1755057 - Create a feature gate/flag for the best match feature

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Firefox :: Address Bar, task, P1)

Description

[Drew Willcoxon :adw]

We should create a feature gate/flag for best match. There are a number of benefits:

• Unblocks us from the Product decision of whether we want to ship the feature as an experiment or let it ride the trains
• Lets us start landing patches that expose best match to the user
• Lets us start using best match right away as we're developing it
• Lets QA start verifying bugs as they land instead of having to wait until some later date

The only drawback is we're adding yet another pref, which incurs maintenance and causes confusion, but these are small prices in comparison to the benefits.

Comment 1

[Drew Willcoxon :adw]

Attachment: Bug 1755057 - Part 1: Create a feature gate/flag for the best match feature.

This revision involves two prefs:

browser.urlbar.bestMatch.enabled

Currently this pref corresponds to the user's choice of whether to enable best
matches. This revision changes its meaning so that it's now the gate for the
whole best match feature. If it's false, then the best match preferences UI will
not appear and best matches will not appear in the urlbar. If it's true, then
the preferences UI will appear, and the second pref below controls whether best
matches will appear in the urlbar.

browser.urlbar.suggest.bestmatch

This new pref takes on the old meaning of the first pref: It corresponds to
whether the user has enabled best matches.

With these two prefs, we have a similar setup to the quick suggest prefs: one
pref for the whole feature, quickSuggest.enabled, and another pref for whether
quick suggest results will appear in the urlbar -- actually two prefs since
there are two kinds of quick suggest results, suggest.quicksuggest.sponsored
and suggest.quicksuggest.nonsponsored.

Also, Product says best match should be enabled by default (see
"design/interaction notes" at the bottom of this Figma),
so I set the default value of browser.urlbar.suggest.bestmatch to true, which
means it will be enabled by default when the feature gate is enabled.

Part 2 of this bug will update the preferences UI.

Comment 2

[Drew Willcoxon :adw]

Attachment: Bug 1755057 - Part 2: Don't show best match in the preferences UI if the best match feature is disabled.

This is based on part 1 in D138583. It hides the best match toggle switch when
the best match feature is disabled. The best match feature is a sub-feature of
Firefox Suggest, so the toggle is also hidden if Suggest is disabled, along with
all the other Suggest UI.

Depends on D138254, D138583

Comment 3

[Drew Willcoxon :adw]

Try push with this bug and bug 1753738: https://treeherder.mozilla.org/#/jobs?repo=try&revision=b4471e971e210d0b16c6c1f3f2718dfda0c74058

Comment 4

[Pulsebot]

Pushed by [e-mail]:
https://hg.mozilla.org/integration/autoland/rev/dd9ce26c988e
Part 1: Create a feature gate/flag for the best match feature. r=daisuke
https://hg.mozilla.org/integration/autoland/rev/5e34f04e5edd
Part 2: Don't show best match in the preferences UI if the best match feature is disabled. r=daisuke,Gijs,preferences-reviewers

Comment 5

[Cristian Tuns]

https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/rev/dd9ce26c988e
https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/rev/5e34f04e5edd

Comment 6

[Drew Willcoxon :adw]

Marking qe-verify- because we'll want to verify the other various bugs that depend on this new feature gate pref and not this bug itself. For example, the STR for the pref UI bug 1755100 include toggling this pref.