1387095 - [UX] Eliminate submenu for "Send Link/Page to Device" contextual action when only one other device exists

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Firefox :: Sync, enhancement)

Description

[Ronan Jouchet [:ronjouch]]

Currently, when sending a page/link to my only other device
(e.g. called "home" if I'm using device "work"), I:

1. Right-click the page/link.
2. Point the "Send {Link/Page} to Device" submenu.
3. Move the pointer to the child submenu with a single "home" item.
4. Click "home".

It would be neat if Firefox saw I only have one other device
and got rid of the submenu, making the steps simply:

1. Right-click the page/link
2. Click "Send {Link/Page} to Device 'home'"

Comment 1

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

Ryan, WDTY?

Comment 2

[Ryan Feeley [:rfeeley]]

In theory I like it, but in practice there is a few problems:

1. Device names are often quite long by default and can't currently be changed on iOS. Send Page to {Device} would be great if device names were all shorter than the word "device", but most are longer. For example, my Mac’s default name is 50 characters.
2. "Send Page to Device" already localizes to be quite long in some languages [1]. 29% longer than English on average.
3. Finally, we may want to put "Connect Another Device" at the bottom of the menu beneath a divider (this page is not ready yet).

[1] https://transvision.mozfr.org/string/?entity=browser/chrome/browser/browser.dtd:sendPageToDevice.label&repo=central

The only way I think it could fly is if we chose a short name for each user.

Names like:
- iPhone
- Android
- Linux
- Mac
- iPad
- Windows

Would those names be available?

Comment 3

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

(In reply to Ryan Feeley [:rfeeley] from comment #2)
> The only way I think it could fly is if we chose a short name for each user.
> 
> Names like:
> - iPhone
> - Android
> - Linux
> - Mac
> - iPad
> - Windows
> 
> Would those names be available?

We could probably arrange for most of those names. I'm not convinced this makes sense though unless we wanted to *always* use that name - eg, in "Synced Tabs" we show the device name, so it might confuse the user.

Comment 4

[Ronan Jouchet [:ronjouch]]

(In reply to Ryan Feeley [:rfeeley] from comment #2)
> The only way I think it could fly is if we chose a short name for each user.

Also, what would the logic choose for my case of two Linux machines?
I'd rather have manually set "home" and "work" than Linux_1 and Linux_2.

Alternatively, could the submenu elimination be done
only if the other device name is short enough?

Comment 5

[Ryan Feeley [:rfeeley]]

Ronan brings up the right point that all of the device names should be easily renamed, most likely from the web. I'll file a bug as I think I still have the design on hand.

I'm suggesting this is a WONTFIX for the reasons I described above. Mark?

Comment 6

[Ronan Jouchet [:ronjouch]]

(In reply to Ryan Feeley [:rfeeley] from comment #5)
> Ronan brings up the right point that all of the device names should be
> easily renamed, most likely from the web. I'll file a bug as I think
> I still have the design on hand.

Going to Prefs > Firefox Account and clicking "Change device name" isn't easy enough?

Comment 7

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

(In reply to Ronan Jouchet from comment #6)
> Going to Prefs > Firefox Account and clicking "Change device name" isn't
> easy enough?

It's not that user's can't rename, it's that we can't rely on them having renamed it to a reasonable length, and we certainly don't want to change behaviour based on the length. The only cost of not having this feature is one additional click when sending a tab, so even though the idea is generally reasonable, I'm with Ryan that we should WONTFIX this.