1830420 - Determine if more messages should use FXA_SIGNIN_FLOW rather than SHOW_FIREFOX_ACCOUNTS

Status: NEW

(Firefox :: Messaging System, task, P3)

Description

[Mike Conley (:mconley) (:⚙️)]

FXA_SIGN_FLOW was added in bug 1830178 (and also bug 1828738), and allows a message to open a Firefox sign-in / account creation page in either a new tab or a new window. Once the sign-in completes, the tab or window is automatically closed.

We might want to see if the places that use SHOW_FIREFOX_ACCOUNTS could make use of FXA_SIGNIN_FLOW instead.

Comment 1

[Shane Hughes [:aminomancer]]

Bug 1795832 (FxA page is opened in a background tab when using the SHOW_FIREFOX_ACCOUNTS action) seems relevant.

Opening in the background seems expected for hyperlinks, but the Sign In CTA doesn't look quite like a hyperlink. I mean, it is just text like a hyperlink, but it doesn't have hyperlink colors. I think I expected it to open a foreground tab, actually, and I didn't immediately notice that it opened a new tab at all. I think that's partly due to the theme and Proton styles, since tabs have relatively low contrast/visual distinctness that might draw the eye up to the tab strip. So maybe the issue is just not noticing that anything happened when I clicked the CTA.

There's a new action that opens the FxA sign-in page in a foreground tab, and then automatically closes that tab when the user is finished signing in. That resolves the awkwardness of opening the sign-in page in a background tab, without any risk of throwing users out of the onboarding flow. So it seems like a straightforward improvement, the one downside I can think of is that it takes away the opportunity to interact with the page that comes after the sign-in flow, which I believe is an affordance to connect a second device (like a mobile device).

For the action's original application that's fine, since we're using the action in the new Device Migration attribution flow, so this is already running on a "second" device, i.e. the one that they're migrating to. And we don't want the user to get sidetracked from the onboarding flow with connecting a bunch of devices, since they can do that after onboarding. Seems like that could be true for the default onboarding flow as well, i.e. we'd prefer to keep the sign-in process as brief as possible so as not to lose the user's attention.

So @Ania @Emily I'm interested to hear what you think since you investigated this in bug 1795832. Would it be an improvement to open a foreground tab and auto-close it after sign-in completes?