1524874 - The preference for prefers-reduced-motion should be boolean instead of integer

Status: NEW

(Core :: Widget, defect, P5)

Description

[Jelle De Loecker]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Ubuntu; Linux x86_64; rv:65.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/65.0

Steps to reproduce:

I noticed the prefers-reduced-motion:reduce media query would always be truthy on my system. Even when I set the about:config flag ui.prefersReducedMotion to false.

Actual results:

Websites using the prefers-reduced-motion:reduce won't be animated anymore.

Expected results:

I've seen quite a few people complain that disabling animations in what they think would only affect their desktop environment suddenly also changes the way their browser behaves.

I disabled Gnome Shell animations because they're damn slow and annoying, but a simple scroll-behavior: smooth on a website is no problem for me, it even gives me a sense of direction on a website.

I think it's a bad idea to hook this into the "disable animations" preference on an OS. Mac OS has a special "Reduce motion" preference, which seems to make much more sense.

But I definitely expect ui.prefersReducedMotion to override that setting. Now I have to choose between broken Gnome Shell animations & (for me) an unpleasant browsing experience.

Comment 1

[Emilio Cobos Álvarez (:emilio)]

At least the fact that you cannot override it should be a bug.

Comment 2

[Emilio Cobos Álvarez (:emilio)]

(In reply to jelle from comment #0)

But I definitely expect ui.prefersReducedMotion to override that setting. Now I have to choose between broken Gnome Shell animations & (for me) an unpleasant browsing experience.

If you make the preference a number instead of a boolean it does override it, can you confirm that?

Comment 3

[Hiroyuki Ikezoe (:hiro)]

It works for me. Just to confirm, the preference is a number value, did you add the pref as a number? I know it's not intuitive at all.

Comment 4

[Jelle De Loecker]

(In reply to Emilio Cobos Álvarez (:emilio) from comment #2)

If you make the preference a number instead of a boolean it does override it, can you confirm that?

Correct, removing the entry (by resetting it & then restarting the browser, didn't find any other way to change the type of the entry) and creating it again as an integer did fix it, thanks!

Comment 5

[Hiroyuki Ikezoe (:hiro)]

Thanks. That's said, it's not intuitive, we should use a boolean preference instead. I don't know the historical reason that why we don't use any boolean preference in nsXPLookAndFeel though, I am going to re-use this bug for it.