1124941 - Improve the way Firefox determines that an account is verified

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 1235607

(Firefox :: Sync, enhancement, P2)

Description

[Drew Willcoxon :adw]

Firefox currently polls the server to determine whether the user's account is verified.  Bug 1018022 slightly improved the polling from a UX perspective, but there's still room for improvement, and bug 1122443 points out that Firefox hits the server too much.

We should improve the way that Firefox determines whether the user is verified, from the perspectives of both UX and server load.

Some things to keep in mind:

* 15-20% of signups are never verified (bug 1018022 comment 4).

* We poll for 20 minutes, but of course the user may verify after that.

* When requesting verification status we always poll, but maybe it makes more sense to poll only when we recently asked the user to verify, and other times simply check once with the server.  e.g., so that we don't continually poll if it's been a month since we asked the user to verify.

* Persist the last time we polled so that poll logic can be smarter by spanning Firefox sessions?

* For users who haven't verified after a long time, remove their account from the browser so we stop checking verification status altogether?

* Use push or long polling instead of polling?

Comment 1

[Drew Willcoxon :adw]

Well, SimplePush is only enabled on Firefox OS.  http://mxr.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/search?string=services.push.enabled

Comment 2

[Mark Hammond [:markh] [:mhammond]]

(In reply to Drew Willcoxon :adw from comment #1)
> Well, SimplePush is only enabled on Firefox OS. 
> http://mxr.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/search?string=services.push.enabled

I wonder if we can enable it for chrome code though?

Comment 3

[Drew Willcoxon :adw]

Nikhil, do you know if it would be OK to enable SimplePush on desktop Firefox for chrome code?  We have a possible use case in this bug.

Comment 4

[Nikhil Marathe [:nsm] (No longer reading bugmail, please needinfo?)]

Kit is taking a stab at this. It should be fairly easy.

Comment 5

[Lina Butler [:lina]]

Nikhil and I are sketching out a Simple Push client that we can expose to chrome code for Hello, FxA, Sync, etc. to use.

Comment 6

[Drew Willcoxon :adw]

Great, thanks Kit, is there a bug for that?  If not, would you mind filing one and marking it blocking this bug so we can track it?

If it's pretty far out in the future, then we might end up fixing this bug in a different way, with a new bug for waiting on SimplePush specifically.

Comment 7

[Drew Willcoxon :adw]

Dropping this bug from the current iteration.  I'm working on other higher priority bugs.

Comment 8

[Lina Butler [:lina]]

Done. We're looking at moving Loop/Hello to the new client, so having FxA as another consumer would be perfect.

Comment 9

[Chris Karlof [:ckarlof]]

Addressed in bug 1235607.