1852051 - [Search Preferences] Remove the Search Bar from the toolbar for users who haven’t used it in 120 days

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Firefox :: Settings UI, enhancement)

Description

[Dão Gottwald [:dao]]

Many legacy profiles likely still have the search bar enabled from when that was the default. There's a good chance that in many profiles, it’s not used much, or indeed not at all. We should detect these cases and remove the search bar so that these profiles move closer to what’s today’s default, and also get simpler Search preferences.

Comment 1

[Karandeep Lubana [:klubana]]

Attachment: Bug 1852051 - Remove the Search Bar from the toolbar for users who haven't used it in 120 days. r=dao

Comment 2

[aoia7rz7l]

(In reply to comment #1)

There's no messaging planned. The idea / hope is that users who haven't used the search bar in 3 months won't care either if it's gone. At that point, pointing out that it's gone might even do more harm than good.

If this meant that the search bar will automatically disappear when I am restoring from a 3-month-or-older backup/image (ESR?), this is quickly approaching Apple's level of twisted logic to automatically re-enable wifi and bluetooth on iOS devices if you don't do it the "correct way".

OK, so we're relying on the pref not being set and detecting that as "we don't know how old it is so we'll leave it for now"? This avoids removing the searchbar immediately on ESR where the code that sets the pref hasn't had a chance to run yet (good!) but also means that if the user never uses the searchbar after the point where the pref-setting or checking code first runs, we also never remove the search bar.

I was also hoping to test if bug 1866616 will cause the search bar to disappear mid-session once the pref value is over 90 days, but it looks like we will first need this bug to land. However, the pref generated when I hit return on the search bar was actually browser.urlbar.browser.search.widget.lastUsed instead of browser.search.widget.lastUsed, and its value was formatted as 2023-11-29T05:00:21.000Z instead of milliseconds since epoch. Are these intentional?

One way to mitigate this would be to set the pref to the current time when the checking code first runs, if it finds the pref empty - as we know that for sure the last time the bar was used is no earlier than that.
OTOH if there are other plans to use the pref's value for something, that might be problematic. WDYT?

Another way to deal with that would be to later update this code to treat the pref not being set as the search bar being unused.

That's just great. Once this happens I can't even expect any backups/images/Qubes AppVMs to respect my choices over time. The "Refresh Firefox" message was also quite annoying, but at least there are ways to get around it.

It's difficult not to see this with a cynical eye, when Mozilla is claiming that they wanted to be less dependent on Google search revenue, while pushing "features" like persisting search terms in the address bar (which conveniently hides all affiliate-related query parameters), google trending suggestions (also in the address bar). Most of the infrastructure moved behind gcp in the last year or two. And shopping "ads" aka Fakespot which is another company that Mozilla have acquired after Pocket. Hell this really explained why Fenix was so focused on implementing credit card autofill just before they closed the repo. If I am remembering this correctly, the fenix address bar is so crowded that users are not allowed to set browser.urlbar.trimURLs to false, but they are also not allowed to hide the useless home button, and yet there is enough space to slip in another shopping cart pageaction for fakespot. Meanwhile actual privacy features like container api support on android are still nowhere to be seen.

But I am just looking for a way to continue deploying the search bar here. I guess the upside when the search bar is finally gone is that I can get rid of all one-off search engines and not deal with issues like bug 1643185.

Comment 3

[Pulsebot]

Pushed by [e-mail]:
https://hg.mozilla.org/integration/autoland/rev/c31e5d6ad2e6
Remove the Search Bar from the toolbar for users who haven't used it in 120 days. r=dao,Gijs

Comment 4

[Atila Butkovits]

https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/rev/c31e5d6ad2e6