301695 - Installer folder selection is unfriendly

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Thunderbird :: Installer, defect)

Description

[betheking]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.10) Gecko/20050720 Firefox/1.0.6
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.10) Gecko/20050720 Firefox/1.0.6

The Mozilla Thunderbird installer isn't very user friendly, when you want to
select a non-default installation location. (To do so, should you really need to
do a custom installation? With the current destination browser, I can actually
understand that.) I used it now (for 1.0.6), and encountered the following:

* When clicking the "Browse..." button, the default in the directory browser was
the temporary folder the installer had unpacked itself to, which would be a
really bad place to install to.

* After navigating to and selecting the folder where I wanted to place the
Thunderbird folder, I clicked on "New Folder".

* To specify the new name, I had to manually click on the newly created folder
and press F2. (Okay, this doesn't happen every time.)

* After entering the name, the "Folder:" field still contains the name "New
Folder". This is confusing. What is really selected? The name in the tree, or
the name in the edit box (which is closer to "OK")? It turns out it was the name
in the tree.

There are other installers which do this much more nicely. They 
generally show a dialog that, although similar, has a path field on top,
followed by a tree browser. It defaults to the same path shown in the installer
(where you clicked "Browse..."). In this case, what I would need to do would be
this (after clicking "Browse..."):

* Navigate to and select the folder where I want the Thunderbird folder. 
This causes the content of the path field to be udpdated with the selected
path, with "\Mozilla Thunderbird" automatically being appended. (If I wanted to
change that, I could do so, by manually editing the path.)

* Press "OK".

This is a common (and easy) way to let the user select a path for installation.

For an example of an (Open source) prorgram where the above destination browser
is used, take a look at Audacity (http://audacity.sourceforge.net/).


Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Start the installer.
2. Select a custom installation.
3. Select "Browse..." to select a different installation location.

Comment 1

[Adam Guthrie]

You're describing a lot of issue here. We try to keep it to one issue per bug.
So, this is probably a duplicate of bug 241282 which has already been fixed.

Comment 2

[Arkady Belousov]

This report is not duplication of bug 241282, this concerns about unfriendly selecting and creating custom target directory. And I wholeheartedly agree with this report: it very unfriendly to select new (especially non-existing) directory to install.

Comment 3

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Do you still see this newer installs?
I don't

Comment 4

[Robert Strong (they/them - no direct email)]

This changed with the implementation of the NSIS installer. If you still see this please reopen. Resolving -> wfm