1401196 - Changing device type causes page refresh

Status: VERIFIED FIXED

(DevTools :: Responsive Design Mode, enhancement, P2)

Description

[Stephanie Hobson [:shobson]]

Picking a new device type out of the drop down in RDM causes the page to refresh.

This is unexpected behaviour.

It's a real problem if you are working in the Style Editor and the refresh causes you to lose all the code you've been working on.

Comment 1

[J. Ryan Stinnett [:jryans] (Use needinfo, replies may be slow)]

Hmm, this is a hard one.  

The refresh currently happens because of touch simulation: choosing a device (for most mobile devices at least) enables touch simulation.  But pages generally can't respond to a changing between non-touch vs. touch, so currently we reload the page so that touch mode is simulated more accurately.

Reloading of course has many down sides, like lost toolbox state, lost app state if it's a complex single page app, etc.

Any suggestions on how we can resolve these two opposing forces?  Should we never trigger a reload for touch, but then notify that it might be needed?  (This is the approach taken by the "old" RDM UI.)  Something else?

Comment 2

[Stephanie Hobson [:shobson]]

I'd be happy if device size and touch simulation operated independently of each other. You could move the little touch icon down next to the device drop down or the device rotate icon. Then you could warn the user that enabling or disabling touch simulation causes a refresh when they interact with it (with a "never warn me again" checkbox on the message).

Right now touch simulation feels like something that happens randomly to me. I had not figured out why sometimes touch turned on and sometimes it did not - probably because I don't want to test "iPad" specifically when switching to iPad, what I'm testing is a screen that is 1024px wide so my mental model is all wrong.

Not sure how many other users take this approach so hopefully you have some analytics or could do some user testing to see if this would be more or less confusing.

Comment 4

[J. Ryan Stinnett [:jryans] (Use needinfo, replies may be slow)]

:shobson, could you check the new behavior in Nightly added by bug 1428816?  The new default is no automatic refreshing.  In addition, there's a new UI control to enable refreshing for certain changes, if desired.

Does this work well for your use case?

Comment 5

[Stephanie Hobson [:shobson]]

It works very well for me, thank you :)

Comment 6

[J. Ryan Stinnett [:jryans] (Use needinfo, replies may be slow)]

Great to hear! :)