1773075 - Can we remove `browser.altClickSave`?

Status: NEW

(Firefox :: Tabbed Browser, task, P5)

Description

[Tom Ritter [:tjr]]

This seems like a very old, off by default pref that has a bunch of tests for it. Do we think anyone would get really upset if we removed it?

Comment 1

[Gregory Pappas [:gregp]]

I know a few people that use this

Comment 2

[Marco Bonardo [:mak]]

My main concern is that it's completely non discoverable, another feature that users won't find.
It was disabled by default in Bug 713052, and there was some discussion about that in bug 876546.
I still fail to see the value of this versus the Save Target With Name context menu option, because if the only benefit is one click VS two, that benefit is extremely small VS the possibility to cleanup this code.

Could you please ask those few people which benefits they find in the feature? We can maybe accomodate those use-cases better.

Comment 3

[Gregory Pappas [:gregp]]

Could you please ask those few people which benefits they find in the feature?

Sure! I got six responses, they can be broken up into two categories:

• They're just used to it
• They have workflows which require downloading a lot of files, and altClickSave helps them work faster.

Both groups said they would be annoyed if this feature was removed.

I'm personally indifferent towards removing this feature, and will happily write the patch to do so. But before we do, I'd like to try creating a browser extension which emulates the behavior.

Comment 4

[Marco Bonardo [:mak]]

(In reply to Gregory Pappas [:gregp] from comment #3)

Sure! I got six responses, they can be broken up into two categories:

• They're just used to it
• They have workflows which require downloading a lot of files, and altClickSave helps them work faster.

Ok, that was my suspect, it's just a matter of click efficiency.

Anyway, we should also investigate if the benefit would be limited to removing the "save" target of handleLinkClick, or if more code could be removed. The former would not be particularly compelling and then this would be a wontfix.
I didn't investigate how much code could be cleaned up yet.