1091919 - Make the Aurora to DevTools Edition transition extremely hard to miss

Status: NEW

(DevTools :: General, defect)

Description

[Justin Dolske [:Dolske]]

The new DevTools Edition will be using a different profile than Aurora did, which means that when an existing Aurora user runs it, all their data will appear to be missing. Bug 1063057 is adding a firstrun page to explain things, but we should err on the side of over-communicating. Tabs can be closed, fail to load, or explanations missed. A confused user may just quit and relaunch hoping for their usual browser to return (at which point the firstrun info would be gone)... Ideally everything would "just work", but since we're not doing that we should at least is painfully obvious to these users what's happening and how to get back. They may be grumpy, but we should make sure they can easily find what they need to do.

I'd suggest that for existing users, there should be a global notification bar, which persists across restarts until they take explicit action.
E.G.: "Things have changed! Looking for your old Aurora browser and settings? [Help, tell me more] [Nah, stop bugging me]"

(One button going to a page -- whatsnew? SUMO? -- with info on what's changed and how to get back their stuff, the other to just disable the notification.)

I'd actually expect most users will very much want their stuff back, so if it's possible to have a "1 click fix" that would be ideal.


As part of this (or separately, if we WONTFIX this), it might be wise to detect if the user had an existing profile last used in Aurora-35, and if so set a pref. That would make it easier to further help these users with a hotfix should we need to do so.

Comment 1

[Jeff Griffiths (:canuckistani) (:⚡︎)]

(In reply to Justin Dolske [:Dolske] from comment #0)
...
> things, but we should err on the side of over-communicating. Tabs can be
> closed, fail to load, or explanations missed. A confused user may just quit
> and relaunch hoping for their usual browser to return (at which point the
> firstrun info would be gone)... Ideally everything would "just work", but
> since we're not doing that we should at least is painfully obvious to these
> users what's happening and how to get back. They may be grumpy, but we
> should make sure they can easily find what they need to do.

Before going further, I would like some harder assertions on things like: 

* how often does firstrun fail, eg %? 
* how many users does that correlate to given the current Aurora population size? I intuitively suspect that's a pretty small number?

I agree the 'explanations missed' is a problem, perhaps the most serious problem.

> I'd suggest that for existing users, there should be a global notification
> bar, which persists across restarts until they take explicit action.
> E.G.: "Things have changed! Looking for your old Aurora browser and
> settings? [Help, tell me more] [Nah, stop bugging me]"
>
> (One button going to a page -- whatsnew? SUMO? -- with info on what's
> changed and how to get back their stuff, the other to just disable the
> notification.)
> 
> I'd actually expect most users will very much want their stuff back, so if
> it's possible to have a "1 click fix" that would be ideal.

Well, we got to a 2-click fix. It's on my todo for Nov 10th to get up in the Monday meeting and show people how to do the 2-click fix, fyi.

The notification idea is interesting, I'm sensitive that these existing users are our friends and we don't want to totally confuse them. I'd rate is as an important problem if we thought large numbers of users running Aurora used it as their default browser, and that there is a real risk of firstrun failing. 

I am 100% convinced that we will confused and frighten someone, that they will tweet it, and peopel will say bad things about us. On the other hand, I'm worried we don't have time at this stage to properly implement and test this, especially as it involves update behaviour. 

> As part of this (or separately, if we WONTFIX this), it might be wise to
> detect if the user had an existing profile last used in Aurora-35, and if so
> set a pref. That would make it easier to further help these users with a
> hotfix should we need to do so.

I completely agree with this in principal, just unsure about the timeline. If you have technical solutions to these problems in mind ( or in a patch? ) please PLEASE talk to Joe ASAP. In particular if we can detect an update from an existing Aurora user, I'm all for this in theory.

Comment 2

[Joe Walker [:jwalker]]

(In reply to Justin Dolske [:Dolske] from comment #0)
> I'd suggest that for existing users, there should be a global notification
> bar, which persists across restarts until they take explicit action.
> E.G.: "Things have changed! Looking for your old Aurora browser and
> settings? [Help, tell me more] [Nah, stop bugging me]"

The question is, can we design something simple enough to pull off in time.

    on-startup:
    
    if (profilename == auroradefault)
        if (!pref(devtools.newprofile.userOKed))
            msg = "Looking for your old settings? [<a href=sumo>Tell me more</a>]   [x]"
            onclose = () => setPref(devtools.newprofile.userOKed, true)
            notification.add(msg, onclose);

Obviously that's not going to compile, but what in the basic logic is wrong?
There are 2 big questions.

One is strings. We're well past string freeze, but the biggest complaints were from l10n who have a number of 'locale checkers' on aurora.

The other is interaction with first-run. I think this could look really bad.


So my gut reaction is to see how this goes when we roll out to [e-mail] on Monday, and have something like this as a hotfix in case there is a problem.


> As part of this (or separately, if we WONTFIX this), it might be wise to
> detect if the user had an existing profile last used in Aurora-35, and if so
> set a pref. That would make it easier to further help these users with a
> hotfix should we need to do so.

Hmmmm. This is fuzzy, many Aurora users will have several channels on their computers, so we're asking 'what did you use last'. But maybe that's useful.

I wonder what we could do as a hotfix though.

Comment 3

[Panos Astithas (he/him) [:past] (please ni?)]

(In reply to Joe Walker [:jwalker] (overloaded - needinfo me or ping on irc) from comment #2)
> > As part of this (or separately, if we WONTFIX this), it might be wise to
> > detect if the user had an existing profile last used in Aurora-35, and if so
> > set a pref. That would make it easier to further help these users with a
> > hotfix should we need to do so.
> 
> Hmmmm. This is fuzzy, many Aurora users will have several channels on their
> computers, so we're asking 'what did you use last'. But maybe that's useful.

Assuming we could get something in today (i.e. less than a week before launch) that would only affect users who actually perform an update this week. The rest will go directly from old Aurora to dev-edition. Is that percentage large enough to make this work meaningful?

Comment 4

[Justin Dolske [:Dolske]]

(In reply to Jeff Griffiths (:canuckistani) from comment #1)

> Before going further, I would like some harder assertions on things like: 
> 
> * how often does firstrun fail, eg %? 
> * how many users does that correlate to given the current Aurora population
> size? I intuitively suspect that's a pretty small number?

I don't think there's any way to get data on those before launch. But given the usual user inattention to such things, I think it's quite likely a lot of users seeing the whatsnew page will not immediately and completely understand what's going on.


(In reply to Joe Walker [:jwalker] (overloaded - needinfo me or ping on irc) from comment #2)

> So my gut reaction is to see how this goes when we roll out to
> [e-mail] on Monday

Not sure that's going to be a meaningful data point, since (1) the email asking for testing is providing context and (2) people explicitly know they're testing something vs being surprised when they launch their browser on November 9th.