370927 - Skip default browser prompt on first launch

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Camino Graveyard :: General, enhancement)

Description

[Stuart Morgan]

This may be a crazy idea, but since the issue of hammering the user with too many things at first launch came up: I think we should consider skipping the default browser prompt for the very first launch.

I hear about this thing called Camino, it's supposed to be cool, so I download it, fire it up, and bam, the first thing I get is a dialog asking if I am ready to commit to using Camino forever. How could I possibly know? I haven't used it yet.

Yes, it would be a bit more work for someone who is installing Camino on their second machine, but I think that's a worthwhile tradeoff--especially since those users are probably going to go right into prefs and tweak them to match the their usual prefs anyway. If we really wanted to, we could perhaps show it on first quit (as a "Now that you've seen how awesome Camino is, do you want to keep it?" sort of thing), but that might be more annoying than worthwhile.

Comment 1

[Smokey Ardisson (offline for a while; not following bugs - do not email)]

See also bug 314072 comment 8 and bug 354643.  If we do your import prompt thing, default browser could be an optional checkbox there, too.

Comment 2

[Stuart Morgan]

Sorry, re-reading I realize I wasn't very clear here: my thought was that we would skip it on the first launch, but then do what we current do on subsequent launches.

Comment 3

[Stuart Morgan]

Confirming, absent any objection ;)

Comment 4

[Stuart Morgan]

Attachment: fix

Rather than make up a new single-shot pref, I'm removing camino.check_default_browser from all-camino.js, setting it on first check, and using the absence of the pref as an indicator of first launch. If we don't want to do that, I can use a new pref instead.

I also removed the navigator bundle ID migration, since we've had two years and two major releases since the change, so it's cruft at this point.

Comment 5

[Smokey Ardisson (offline for a while; not following bugs - do not email)]

(In reply to comment #4)
> Rather than make up a new single-shot pref, I'm removing
> camino.check_default_browser from all-camino.js, 

If we go this way, can you leave that pref in as a comment, since we've decided that we want to document all camino-generated prefs in all-camino.js (see how we do camino.useragent.locale and camino.accept_languages)?  That should leave it documented but prevent it from messing with the setting-on-first check.  Otherwise, I think this proposed method seems like an improvement.

I've been doing some thinking on this subject, though.  What's interesting is that Camino and Firefox are the only two browsers on my Mac that do a "default browser check" at all (I don't have Opera or Shiira here).  Given that hyatt has promised pink that all the known cases of Safari stealing the default browser association have been bugs (instead of malicious like WinIE), I wonder if we shouldn't 

1) dispense with General.prefPane's "Check on launch" checkbox altogether and 

2) just do Stuart's check here *once*, the second launch of Camino on the given profile (if we're not already the default), and be done with it--with some associated polish of the explanatory text there, maybe just an extra \n, to set off "you can set this in General prefs any time you'd like"

Will this adversely affect our conversion rate and/or increase support headaches in the "I clicked on a link from Mail and it opened Safari instead" department?

Comment 6

[Mark Mentovai]

Comment on attachment 293348 [details] [diff] [review]
fix

This is better than what we do now.  I don't think we need a separate pref for this.  Leave a comment in all-camino.js.in as Smokey asks.  OK to check in like this because it's an improvement for sure, but we probably should talk about what Smokey brings up and possibly do that in another bug.

Comment 7

[Stuart Morgan]

Landed on trunk and MOZILLA_1_8_BRANCH with a comment in all-camino.js.

I do think we should have a new bug tracking Smokey's suggestion.

Comment 8

[Smokey Ardisson (offline for a while; not following bugs - do not email)]

(In reply to comment #7)
> I do think we should have a new bug tracking Smokey's suggestion.

Filed bug 408593.