1776266 - Unnecessary indentation of checkboxes under Always Use Private Browsing Mode

Status: NEW

(Firefox :: Settings UI, defect, P3)

Description

[Mike Kaply [:mkaply]]

Attachment: Screenshot 2022-06-23 144200.png

When you select Use custom settings for history in preferences, it shows some checkboxes (see attached image).

The three checkboxes are indented under "Always use private browsing mode" even though they are not necessarily really related to that feature. And the way they disable is contrary to how other indented checkboxes work. (When the box is checked, the three underneath are disabled).

I'm not sure what the correct interaction should be, but the way it works today doesn't line up with the way any of our other nested checkboxes work.

Comment 1

[:Gijs (he/him)]

I hate these checkboxes. This UI is such a mess. Nobody loves it, AFAIK, which I bet means that as soon as we change it more people will complain about the changes. Anyway, see also bug 488894, bug 505548, bug 1460536, bug 1671972, and various other bugs about the sanitize dialog and these prefs that I'm struggling to find right now. Also bug 1423564 and bug 1524995 for previous "fun" bugs around this UI.

Paul, I vaguely recall there's an effort to tackle some of the complexity here. Where is that happening and is any of the stuff in this bug being tackled?

Comment 2

[:Gijs (he/him)]

(TBF, it does not make sense to clear history on closing if always using private browsing mode - that will happen anyway. Same for telling it to "remember" things if you explicitly told it, well, not to remember anything...)

Comment 3

[Emma Zühlcke [:emz]]

I've discussed this issue with Hannah today. It looks like enabling permanent PBM disables the checkboxes, but doesn't actually touch the prefs. That means you can enable sanitize-on-shutdown and enable permanent PBM resulting in both mechanisms enabled. This seems unexpected, since PBM should already clear data. The Sanitizer would then just clear the normal browsing data bucket which never gets used.
We currently don't have any plans that touch this preferences UI specifically. In Bug 1765533 we want to clean up the category dialog.

Comment 4

[BugBot [:suhaib / :marco/ :calixte]]

The severity field is not set for this bug.
:jaws, could you have a look please?

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