1431650 - Always show Recent Updates, and make all of them visible

Status: UNCONFIRMED

(Toolkit :: Add-ons Manager, enhancement, P5)

Description

[David Hedlund]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/52.0.2743.116 Safari/537.36 Edge/15.15063
Build ID: 20180103231032

Steps to reproduce:

Opened Add-on Manager -> Gear icon -> "View Recent Updates"



Expected results:

There used to be an add-on for this: Addons Recent Updates - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/addons-recent-updates/. But it is not a WebExtension so it's not working with Firefox 57.

But it doesn't really matter even if the add-on worked; I think View Recent Updates always should be visible.

Comment 1

[Sören Hentzschel]

> I think View Recent Updates always should be visible

I don't see any reason (I would even see this as "visual noise") and your bug description doesn't contain an explanation why this should be changed.

You should always give reasons *why* something should be changed and not only say *that* something should be changed.

Comment 2

[Andrew Swan [:aswan]]

Adding a few ux folks who are working on revamping how users manage addons.  We're not going to make any changes like this to the existing UI, but they can consider this as part of the current design work.
Søren is right though, explaining why this is important to you is much more helpful than just saying "this should be different"

Comment 3

[David Hedlund]

I think that the user interface to Always show Recent Updates is odd and confusing.

Comment 4

[Kestrel]

Update history makes it easier for users to monitor and troubleshoot extensions which are not always trustworthy or reliable. While extensions now have less privileges than before, they are being shipped without review and can be updated more frequently. If something changes or breaks unexpectedly, there's a good chance it was due to a recent extension update and it isn't always obvious that this is the case or which extension was responsible.

Automatic updates are invisible to the user and the Recent Updates list is buried behind a menu with a limited 48-hour history. If the user is too late, the list is blank which is uninformative and potentially misleading, the most recently updated extension can then only be found by clicking through each one. The more technically minded can check the modification time of the xpi files in the extensions folder but extension IDs still need to be interpreted.

In comparison, Firefox's application update history is more visible in about:preferences and has more history, showing updates going back several months.

It is in everyone's best interests for extension updates to be done as transparently as possible, with a prominent and comprehensive update history to make troubleshooting easier.

Comment 5

[Andrew Swan [:aswan]]

Emanuela, bringing this to your attention to consider in ongoing addons manager design work.

Comment 6

[YF (Yang)]

Showing panel and an unread number might be a way to let users know that add-ons have been updated automatically, view the release notes, and help to troubleshoot.

Comment 7

[emanuela [ux]]

Thank you :aswan, and thank you :kestrel for sharing your reasons!

I'll definitely go back to this bug when we hit that part of the redesign.