288281 - Cancel downloads on quit dialogue can be misleading

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Toolkit :: Downloads API, defect)

Description

[Daniel C]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.8b2)
Gecko/20050329 Firefox/1.0+
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.8b2)
Gecko/20050329 Firefox/1.0+

The dialogue displayed when attempting to quit with a current download can be
misleading due to the title, text in the dialogue, text on the buttons and in
general. I have outlined 6 bugs with the dialogue below, although they are all
interlinked and not necessarily seperate bugs.

1. The default button quits the program and cancels any current downloads. The
other button should be the default one.

2. Title doesn't match button options. "Cancel All Downloads?" > "Don't Exit" /
"Cancel # Download(s)"

3. Question doesn't match button options. "Are you sure you want to exit?" >
"Don't Exit" / "Cancel # Download(s)"

4. Menu action doesn't match button options (the menuitem chosen to invoke the
dialogue.) "File > Quit" > "Don't Exit" / "Cancel # Download(s)"

5. Button options perform opposite actions, but the text doesn't suggest this.
"Don't Exit" doesn't imply the opposite of "Cancel # Download(s)"

6. Word 'exit' should be 'quit' on Linux and Mac.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:

1. Start to download a fairly large file (one that will take longer than 20
seconds or so on your connection; the latest trunk build should do, see URL.)
2. File > Quit

Actual Results:

Dialogue appeared with misleading title, text and buttons.

Expected Results:

Dialogue should have appeared with clear title, text and buttons.

The reason I am filing this bug is as follows. I began downloading a large file,
and then closed the download manager. A while later I forgot about the download
and went to quit Firefox. The dialogue appeared, I remembered about the download
and decided I did not want to quit. The obvious thing for me was to click
Cancel, as I had previously performed File > Quit, so Cancel to me meant Cancel
the quitting. The text in the dialogue also implied this "Are you sure you want
to exit?" Cancel again seems the appropriate action when landed with this
question. It was also the default button, so I pressed enter.

Obviously I won't make the same mistake again, and I should have read more of
the button to notice that it wasn't just 'Cancel'. However, I'm just so used to
the Cancel button cancelling whatever I just asked a program to do. File > Quit;
Cancel. This did cause me to lose a lot of time and download.

I propose something like:

# files downloading...
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Firefox is currently downloading # files. Quitting will cancel the download(s)
and they will be irrecoverable.

Are you sure you want to quit and cancel the download(s)?

|Yes|        |||No|||

Comment 1

[Daniel C]

Attachment: Screenshot

Screenshot showing the current dialogue on Linux with Gtk2. The default button
cancels all downloads and quits Firefox (bad.) It is also poorly labeled
(Cancel implies that it will cancel quitting.)

Comment 2

[Ben Fowler]

I suspect that this is a dup of one the many UI/Dialogue bugs that end with
people taking entrenched postions.

Arguably the option you took should not be available from the dialogue you saw.

When a download is in progress, Quitting should be unavailable. If you attempt
to quit then the dialogue should have only an 'OK' button to acknowledge the 
message that Quit is not available; and the instruction that if you really
want to quit, to go to the download manager and cancel/pause the active
downloads.

Are 'Yes' and 'No' suitable for dialogue buttons in this case?

In your schema isn't Cancel always going to be ambiguous between 'Cancel the
Quit operation' and 'Cancel the Downloads'.

What if the user wanted to review the downloads and cancel some of them before
trying again?

If it helps, Apple have made just this mistake in the dialogue box that appears
on quitting the Software Update operation. 

Comment 3

[Daniel C]

Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.8b4) Gecko/20050811 Firefox/1.0+

Status: UNCONFIRMED -> NEW

New proposal:

+------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
|                                 Confirm Quit                                 |
|------------------------------------------------------------------------------|
|(Firefox) is currently downloading # file(s). Quitting (Firefox) now will     |
|cancel these/this download(s). Are you sure you want to quit (Firefox)?       |
|                                                                              |
|                                                                              |
|  ________________                                          ________________  |
| ||  Don't Quit  ||                                        |      Quit      | |
| ||______________||                                        |________________| |
+------------------------------------------------------------------------------+

This solves problems 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6 (assuming entities are used for
"Firefox" and "Quit".

Comment 4

[Shawn Wilsher :sdwilsh]

This has been greatly improved for Firefox 3.  Any remaining issues should probably go into new bugs (you've brought up a number of issues here, which is generally frowned upon.