1794509 - In unified extensions menu, it's not clear why some extensions' titles are grayed out and unclickable vs. bright and clickable (plus: nothing happens when I click the clickable ones)

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 1777484

(WebExtensions :: General, defect)

Description

[Daniel Holbert [:dholbert]]

STR:

1. Set about:config pref extensions.unifiedExtensions.enabled to true and restart Firefox.
2. Install these add-ons:
   https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account-containers/
   https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/enhancer-for-youtube/
   https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/bitwarden-password-manager/
3. Visit https://www.youtube.com , and open the Unified Extension Button Menu, and mouse over the titles of your extensions. If the extension titles turn into clickable buttons, try clicking them.

ACTUAL RESULTS:

• At YouTube, BitWarden and Enhancer for YouTube are rendered with "bright-looking" text, vs. Multi-Account Containers is rendered with "Grayed out" text. It's not clear what that difference is supposed to convey; all three extensions report themselves as having the same permissions on that site. ("Can always read and change data")
• The two "bright-looking" entries (BitWarden and Enhancer for YouTube) both get hover-styling when I mouse over them, suggesting that something will happen when I click them. But nothing happens; the menu just disappears.

EXPECTED RESULTS:

• More intuitively-conveyed reasons for why certain menu entries are rendered with disabled vs. enabled styling.
• If entries are clickable, something should probably happen when I click them.

Comment 1

[Daniel Holbert [:dholbert]]

Attachment: screencast

Here's a screencast of what I'm seeing here. (Apologies, my screencast doesn't capture my cursor, so you'll have to imagine/infer my cursor position.)

In this screencast, I just open the menu, and mouse over the three items for the three different extensions. As you can see, all 3 are active, but the 3rd one is grayed out for some reason and doesn't get any hover styling. Then I try clicking the clickable ones, and the menu just disappears when I click them.

Comment 2

[Daniel Holbert [:dholbert]]

Attachment: screencast showing how "grayed-out" extension changes to look like the others if I hover its cog button

One additional bit of confusion here (this one might want its own bug but I'm not sure); if I hover the icon for a "grayed-out" extension, then its title changes from "grayed-out" to looking "bright" and looking like all the others. Here's a screencast showing this, where I'm hovering the cog icon for Firefox Multi-Account Containers.

So: to the extent that some meaning is conveyed by the grayed-out-vs-bright text coloring, that meaning gets a bit muddled by the coloring-change when the menu-cog gets hovered.

Comment 3

[William Durand [:willdurand]]

More intuitively-conveyed reasons for why certain menu entries are rendered with disabled vs. enabled styling.

FWIW I fixed part of this problem in Bug 1794085, a clickable extension button should indicate "Permission needed [...]". There is also Bug 1794427 that is related (for MV2 extensions, which I think is what you have installed at the moment).

I am keeping this bug open because I think the following is still valid:

If entries are clickable, something should probably happen when I click them.

Note that this is tricky because the extension might decide to not do anything and we cannot really control that (an extension could declare an action that does nothing but that will still enable its button in the unified extensions panel).

Comment 4

[Daniel Holbert [:dholbert]]

(In reply to William Durand [:willdurand] from comment #3)

If entries are clickable, something should probably happen when I click them.

Note that this is tricky because the extension might decide to not do anything and we cannot really control that (an extension could declare an action that does nothing but that will still enable its button in the unified extensions panel).

Sure, I can imagine that extensions might make a mistake and have a null button-click action. But I don't think that's the problem here; I have yet to find any extension whose click-action does anything in this menu.

From some extension-installing exploration in a new Firefox profile, I've only found the following extensions[1] that are clickable (when viewing e.g. https://youtube.com), and none of these have any obvious effect when clicked:

• BitWarden
• FeedBro
• Measure-It
• Enhancer for YouTube
• SponsorBlock for YouTube

In contrast: if I test e.g. "Measure-It" in Chrome (it's also available there), then the extension's measurement UI comes up when I click its button in the analogous extension menu.

Comment 5

[Daniel Holbert [:dholbert]]

(In reply to Daniel Holbert [:dholbert] from comment #4)

I have yet to find any extension whose click-action does anything in this menu.

Relatedly: for many of the extensions whose unified-extension-menu items are unclickable in Firefox, Chrome has them being clickable in their unified-extension-menu. (In Chrome, they just open the add-on's own popup-panel -- the panel that you get if you click the extension's toolbar icon.) This is true for e.g. e.g. uBlock origin, Stylus, DuckDuckGo Privacy Essentials, FeedBro -- all of these are unclickable in Firefox's menu vs. open up a panel in Chrome's menu.

I'm not sure if this behavioral difference is a design decision, vs. a trivial bug, vs. something yet-to-be-implemented, vs. something else -- but right now, this difference makes this menu feel kinda broken in Firefox. The user experience of a menu-with-mostly-unclickable-contents feels a bit off/wrong. (Let me know if I should spin this off as a separate bug.)

Comment 6

[William Durand [:willdurand]]

:dholbert I think you're mostly right, what you're describing is captured in Bug 1777484, which hasn't been implemented yet because it requires major changes in CUI (see Bug 1784946 and Bug 1784947 for instance). This is the "next" thing I'll be working on, though.

Comment 7

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

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

For more information, please visit auto_nag documentation.

Comment 8

[William Durand [:willdurand]]

I am going to mark this bug as duplicate of Bug 1777484 since that's where we'll implement more features in the panel. I also sent this bug to UX to see if we can improve the UI when we have many greyed out extensions in this panel.