1530627 - After disabling Bookmarks/History homepage sections, they do not show up in the browser menu either

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(Firefox for Android Graveyard :: Theme and Visual Design, defect)

Description

[jh_walker]

Attachment: ffa-bkmks-hstry.zip

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:65.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/65.0

Steps to reproduce:

1. Use Firefox for Android with all homepage panels enabled (Top Sites / Bookmarks / History).
2. Disable the Bookmarks and/or History panels (... > Settings > General > Home > Panels).
3. Return to home. Observe Bookmarks / History panels no longer display (as intended).
4. Open browser menu (...); observe the Bookmarks / History menu items have also been removed.

(ZIP of numbered screenshots attached with this report).

Actual results:

When the "Bookmarks" and "History" homepage panels are disabled in Firefox for Android, the respective menu links are also removed from the main ("...") menu.

This means that disabling the "Bookmarks" / "History" homepage panels effectively removes Bookmarks / History from the UI completely, so it is not possible to access your Bookmarks or History with the homepage panels disabled.

Expected results:

Disabling the Bookmarks / History homepage panels should only remove the panel as indicated by the Settings screen, with no other side effects.

Because the respective menu links are also removed at present, it means it is impossible to access bookmarks / history in the browser if you decide to remove the homepage panels (which is a perfectly reasonable decision made possible by settings).

I consider this must be a bug; there is no warning whatsoever in settings that disabling the panels will also remove the menu entries.

I want to disable the Firefox homepage, with all panels removed so I just see the simple grey-on-white Firefox logo, but doing so means I can no longer access my bookmarks or history in Firefox for Android. Since there are no "about:" URLs for these pages, it is impossible to access this content if you disable the homepage panels.

Comment 1

[Kevin Brosnan [Ex-Mozilla]]

disabling the menu items is expected behavior

Comment 2

[jh_walker]

Why is this expected?

With the homepage panels disabled, there is no way (that I've found) to access bookmarks and history within the browser?

What's the rationale for that?

To me those are two very different activities... just because I don't want to see bookmarks/history on home, does not mean I never want to use those features...