1724976 - Change visible preferences and their wordings for close tab warnings and session restore

Status: VERIFIED FIXED

(Firefox :: Settings UI, enhancement, P3)

Description

[:Gijs (he/him)]

Attachment: Screenshot

See attached spec.

This entails:

• removing the sessionstore-specific checkbox and pref, and any logic that avoids the close tab dialog when session restore is turned on - it should only honour the main "warn when closing" pref
• label changes on the session restore item
• making the checkbox for "warn you when closing multiple tabs" always appear
• change the label on that checkbox.

Comment 1

[:Gijs (he/him)]

We should probably wait with implementing this until bug 1724977 is fixed, to avoid surprising users who have both session restore on and didn't touch their close tab warning preference.

Comment 2

[:Gijs (he/him)]

Attachment: Spec screenshot

The spec was updated.

Note: we're not implementing the change to the default browser setting referenced in the spec in this bug.

Comment 3

[Neil Deakin]

Attachment: Bug 1724976, whether to show quit warning should not be dependent on session restore state, and remove the redundant browser.sessionstore.warnOnQuit preference, r=gijs

Depends on D124220

Comment 4

[Pulsebot]

Pushed by [e-mail]:
https://hg.mozilla.org/integration/autoland/rev/7a0f890641a5
whether to show quit warning should not be dependent on session restore state, and remove the redundant browser.sessionstore.warnOnQuit preference, r=Gijs,fluent-reviewers,preferences-reviewers

Comment 5

[Sandor Molnar[:smolnar]]

https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/rev/7a0f890641a5

Comment 6

[Patrick Westerhoff]

Coming here from bug 1730308 where we’re a bit confused with the current behavior in Nightly..

removing the sessionstore-specific checkbox and pref, and any logic that avoids the close tab dialog when session restore is turned on - it should only honour the main "warn when closing" pref

Does that mean that regardless of whether session restore is enabled or not, the warning will always be displayed or not depending on the “warn when closing multiple tabs” checkbox? So if I have session restore disabled, I can simply disable the warning and be sure that session restore will still restore my tabs after restarting Firefox?

And more importantly: What about the situation, where I want to be warned about closing multiple tabs but do not want to be warned if I am closing the last window since the tabs in there will be restored when I restart Firefox?

I think this is actually a somewhat common situation: You have a main window with a bunch of tabs that you want to have restored on relaunch. And sometimes, you open up a separate window with its own tabs to do some stuff inside. Now, one might close that additional window, so a warning might be appreciated in case you do this accidentally. For that, I would tick the “warn when closing multiple tabs” checkbox since I am actively closing tabs (in their own window). But when I am then closing the last window, I am not actually closing any tabs (with enabled session restore); instead, I am closing Firefox which will happily restore all my tabs (which I didn’t close), so there is no need for a warning there.

I think this situation is missing with the new implementation even though it was something that was working fine before: If you have session restore enabled, you usually do not care about whether you accidentally “close” the final window (i.e. Firefox). But you may still care about accidentally closing other windows, so a warning is definitely useful there.

For what it matters, I personally hit it a lot that I have two windows open: my main window with a bazillion tabs, and a second one with some temporary stuff I don’t care about. I then forget about that second window, for example because it’s minimized or whatever. If I now attempt to close Firefox (the whole process), I might close the main window: With the warning enabled, Firefox now protects me from losing all my tabs because there is another window open that would now count as the “main window”. – But with the new behavior, Firefox warns me all the time regardless of whether there is another window open or not, making me very insecure about the session restore functionality.

Comment 7

[saikogekido]

For what it matters, I personally hit it a lot that I have two windows open: my main window with a bazillion tabs, and a second one with some temporary stuff I don’t care about. I then forget about that second window, for example because it’s minimized or whatever. If I now attempt to close Firefox (the whole process), I might close the main window: With the warning enabled, Firefox now protects me from losing all my tabs because there is another window open that would now count as the “main window”. – But with the new behavior, Firefox warns me all the time regardless of whether there is another window open or not, making me very insecure about the session restore functionality.

This is what I experienced as well. As someone who has been using the session restore functionality for a very long time and who has been relying on the "close x tabs" warning to prevent me from closing the main window of tabs, this change was pretty shocking and scary. I actually filed a bug here: bug 1730308 and then backed up all of my open tabs in a bookmarks folder before hitting the close button. It was even more confusing to them open the browser and find that session restore did work and it was just the warning that had changed.

I feel this change would disrupt nearly every user who uses this functionality. Please revert this change or consider the use cases for users who rely on the warning to only appear when closing a window that will not be restored.

Comment 8

[clessili]

Sorry for metoo-ing but I hope my input can be of help.

I want Firefox to ask "Closing x tabs" before closing tabs when there's another window open, not if I chose to exit Firefox: currently the prompt says I'm closing x amount of tabs, but that's just not true, I'm quitting the program and the tabs will still be there next time.

And I'd prefer if Firefox asked confirmation only when I hit Ctrl+Q, not if I chose "Quit Firefox" from the menu. The current behaviour prevents the OS from automatically rebooting for an update.

The checkboxes say "Confirm before closing multiple tabs" and "Confirm before quitting with ⌘Q" but neither are doing what you'd expect.

Comment 9

[:Gijs (he/him)]

It seems like the last 3 commenters all want basically the following:

1. warn when closing a single window with multiple tabs
2. don't warn when closing the entire application (ie a single window, if that is the only window, or File > exit / quit)

With the rationale being that session restore will automatically bring things back in case (2), whereas it won't in case (1). And to some degree, the differentiation is being used as a "canary" for whether or not a second window is open.

However you could easily reopen the single closed window with ctrl-shift-n (cmd-shift-n on macOS) and/or the corresponding menu entry. That uses the same session restore functionality you rely on for restoring the entire application when it exits. If you were willing to close the window to have it restored by session restore on next start, without further warnings, then presumably that also works if you "accidentally" close a single window. In other words, I think you all just want to turn this warning off completely and, if you find yourself closing a single window when you expected to close the entire app, to restore the window with Ctrl-Shift-N -- or to get used to quitting all of Firefox using Ctrl-Shift-Q/Cmd-Q/Ctrl-Q (on Win/macOS/Linux) or the relevant menu entry, when it'll close all windows.

It sounds like you're all on Nightly and are experiencing the mid-development experience. The dialog will get turned off for all users in bug 1724977 (hasn't landed on nightly yet), so there will be no "scary" experience in the sense of an unexpected dialog -- though some users are undoubtedly going to be surprised if they close the last window and get no more warning (esp. when session restore is not configured). We're adding mitigations for that in other bugs. I'm sorry that the mid-development Nightly experience was disruptive for you.

I don't think we're going to (re-)add even more complexity to special-case session restore. The end goal here is to have fewer disruptions, hence our intent to disable the warning for everyone by default. Session restore is used by a small fraction of our userbase. The session restore case for the dialogs (where users used to have dialogs and they'd stop appearing when enabling session restore) was always kind of weird, and people were regularly confused about it. I appreciate that you all were not and had Firefox configured Just So, and that therefore this change is disruptive - but I do think you'll ultimately be better served by the new set-up. We had several months of discussions internally about the best way to solve this issue, involving upwards of 2 dozen people, and a whole host of different workflows, and at this point I think we're comfortable with the trade-offs.

Comment 10

[Cletus Van Damme]

(In reply to :Gijs (he/him) from comment #9)

It sounds like you're all on Nightly and are experiencing the mid-development experience. The dialog will get turned off for all users in bug 1724977 (hasn't landed on nightly yet), so there will be no "scary" experience in the sense of an unexpected dialog -- though some users are undoubtedly going to be surprised if they close the last window and get no more warning (esp. when session restore is not configured). We're adding mitigations for that in other bugs. I'm sorry that the mid-development Nightly experience was disruptive for you.

I've just experienced the new behaviour on Beta, and initially had similar sentiments to the previous comments about how this is being applied with session restore. browser.tabs.warnOnClose has saved me many times, so it was a concern to see its effectiveness diminished (which is what the new behaviour does).

But after playing around with "History > Recently closed windows", it seems sufficiently robust that maybe we're too set in our ways and should just disable the warning nowadays?

Trouble is, the user needs to be conscious of that restore functionality. I wasn't, and my initial experience with the changes is as follows:

1. At some point during Beta updates, browser.tabs.warnOnClose was flipped to the new default setting.
2. I accidentally closed my main window while a second was still open, and due to #1, there was no warning.
3. Used various profanities then went trawling though backups for the most recent copy of my profile to restore tabs.

I'm not sure if #1 is what's meant to happen come release time. After reverting the setting, the new behaviour led to the same confusion described in saikogekido's comment above, but that's better than losing tabs.

Comment 11

[:Gijs (he/him)]

(In reply to Cletus Van Damme from comment #10)

Trouble is, the user needs to be conscious of ["History > Recently closed windows"]. I wasn't,

Yep, we're considering showing a similar one-time infobar pointing out the "recently closed windows" bits as we do for "restore previous session", but we didn't get to it for this project.

I'm not sure if [browser.tabs.warnOnClose being flipped to the new default setting] is what's meant to happen come release time.

Yes, it is. There's a SUMO page explaining how things work in 94 and above: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-configure-close-tab-warnings-firefox .

Romain, I would have expected a relnote for this, but I don't see any on either https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/94.0a1/releasenotes/ nor https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/94.0beta/releasenotes/ - can we get that fixed (and make sure it shows up for the, uh, release, release notes, with a link to SUMO?

Comment 12

[Romain Testard [:RT]]

Yes this got missed, I requested an update to the relnotes page

Comment 13

[Negritas Sergiu, Desktop QA]

Hello! I have managed to reproduce the issue on firefox 93.0a1(2021-08-10) on Ubuntu 20. I can confirm that the issue is fixed on firefox 94.0b9 and 95.0a1(2021-10-22) on Ubuntu 20, Windows 10 and MacOS 10.15.

I will update the flags and the resolution of this issue!

Thank you!