303191 - Show progress bar when checking for extension updates

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Toolkit :: Add-ons Manager, enhancement)

Description

[IU]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8b4) Gecko/20050802 Firefox/1.0+
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8b4) Gecko/20050802 Firefox/1.0+

Please add a progress bar to the new Deer Park Extensions "Find Updates."  It is
now difficult to tell if Firefox is actually doing anything.  What could happen
is that a progress bar could appear just above the buttons, while updates are
being located, and complete by displaying how many updates were found, and
either have an "X" or "OK" that the user can click on or automatically disappear
one the user clicks anywhere on the windows.  I have many extension (53 of
them); thus, it is difficult to know if Deer Park found anything without
scrolling through the list.

Alternately, after the progress bar reaches the end, if updates are found, maybe
you could show only those updates along with a checkbox in front of them so a
user could check the ones to update then click "Apply" or "Cancel"

These are just suggestion.  However, the present behavior is confusing, as there
is no indication that anything happened.

Lastly, if it's not too much to ask, could you please add a "Sort by Name"
option to the extensions window context menu.

Thanks

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. N/A
2.
3.

Actual Results:  
No progress shown.  User must scroll through the list to determine if anything
was found.  If nothing was found, user may not even know if it worked.


Expected Results:  
A progress indicator with an indication of how many updates were found (0 or more).

Comment 1

[Ria Klaassen (not reading all bugmail)]

I second this request. Normally, if you wait long enough (more than 3 minutes is
not an exception) a list with extensions is finally presented with an "Install
Now" button (see Bug 302750 ).
But without any information that the updater is busy, people give up after some
time. My personal opinion is that searching for updates should not last longer
than 15 seconds.  

Comment 2

[Jaime Mitchell (use [e-mail] for email)]

Another possibilty might be to scroll each item into view as it is checked for
updates.

Comment 3

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

The amount of time it takes to check for updates is dependent on several factors
such as number of items to check, connection speed, size of the data returned,
site providing the data being available, is the data cached, etc.

Items are not checked serially so scrolling each item into view is not a good
solution... the ui would bounce all over the place. Also, changing it to check
serially would make it take longer to check for updates.

Comment 4

[Mike Beltzner [:beltzner, not reading bugmail]]

We could pretty easily add in space for a status label between the bottom of the
list of extensions and the various buttons in which a "Checking for updates to
installed extensions ..." throbber could appear. In most cases where there are >
3 extensions this would almost flash, though, as it would appear/disappear so
quickly. If no updates are found, the status line could change to "No updates
were found for the installed extensions" ... updates found leads to the usual
dialog from there.

(Note that sorting by name is bug 254428)

Comment 5

[Ben Basson]

In my opinion, the easiest and best thing here is to have a modal dialog appear
while checking is in progress. This would also prevent the user from closing the
window and any potential problems involved with that.

Nominating to block 1.8b4 in case of l10n impact. Also, the severity of this
should probably be bumped up, this is more important than an optional addition
to the EM.

Comment 6

[Mike Connor [:mconnor]]

Definitely need some form of user feedback here, now that its a global check.

Comment 7

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

Fixed on trunk by the checkin of bug 329045