1117914 - Explore adding option to "open in background" in the Android "Open with" list

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(Firefox for Android Graveyard :: General, defect)

Description

[Anthony Lam (:antlam) Find me, @antlam on Slack!]

From a UX standpoint, having an option in there that exposes this functionality earlier makes sense. Once the user selects this, links would just be added to their queue in Firefox (current Open-in-background UX). When they next open Firefox, this list would be present for them to act on.

The point of this option is so that they won't have to jump into Firefox and switch back to Twitter (or whatever app they got the link from). This (especially if they click "Always") would allow them to create a temporary queue of links without having to leave their app.

Note: UX still needed around explaining this for first time users: Bug 1112195

Comment 1

[Mark Finkle (:mfinkle) (use needinfo?)]

Do we want to add "Open in Background" in the Android "Open with" list? This list is only shown to people that have not picked a default browser. It also means we'd need to create two Intents / Activities to handle opening URLs: One for foreground and one for background.

I was hoping we'd handle this action using the normal VIEW Intent, giving the user a chance to say "Yes, I want to try using the 'open in background' mode". After that, any URL opened in Firefox would be open in the background and display a toast: "Opened in Firefox | Switch". When the user switches to Firefox, using the "switch" toast action or the Recent Apps list, the queued URLs would be shown to the user and opened in tabs.

Comment 2

[Anthony Lam (:antlam) Find me, @antlam on Slack!]

(In reply to Mark Finkle (:mfinkle) from comment #1)
> I was hoping we'd handle this action using the normal VIEW Intent, giving
> the user a chance to say "Yes, I want to try using the 'open in background'
> mode". After that, any URL opened in Firefox would be open in the background
> and display a toast: "Opened in Firefox | Switch". When the user switches to
> Firefox, using the "switch" toast action or the Recent Apps list, the queued
> URLs would be shown to the user and opened in tabs.

Absolutely - this is still very much the idea (from our conversation). But I wanted to see if we might explore capturing those without a default chosen as well. So, this would be in addition just for those without a default.

Comment 3

[Martyn Haigh (:mhaigh)]

I would rather we only have one target in the intent resolver dialog - having two in there could lead to confusion when you've just installed fennec and you're first presented with the list of choices.

Comment 4

[Mark Finkle (:mfinkle) (use needinfo?)]

And keep in mind, even if a person does not have Firefox as the default, and the intent resolver/chooser dialog does appear - if they pick Firefox and even do "Just Once", the new flow can kick in.

Comment 5

[BMO Automation]

We have completed our launch of our new Firefox on Android. The development of the new versions use GitHub for issue tracking. If the bug report still reproduces in a current version of [Firefox on Android nightly](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.mozilla.fenix) an issue can be reported at the [Fenix GitHub project](https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/fenix/). If you want to discuss your report please use [Mozilla's chat](https://wiki.mozilla.org/Matrix#Connect_to_Matrix) server https://chat.mozilla.org and join the [#fenix](https://chat.mozilla.org/#/room/#fenix:mozilla.org) channel.