Closed Bug 541205 Opened 15 years ago Closed 15 years ago

No apparent way to disable persona

Categories

(Firefox :: General, defect)

Product:
Firefox
Component:
General
Platform:
x86
Windows XP
Type:
defect
Priority:
Not set
Severity:
normal

Tracking

()

Status:
RESOLVED WORKSFORME

People

(Reporter: darren.henderson, Unassigned)

Details

User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.2) Gecko/20100115 Firefox/3.6 Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.2) Gecko/20100115 Firefox/3.6 At the very least, personas has the potential to become yet another annoyance - please provide or point to a knob that will allow users to completely disable it. I don't find it useful functionality, I don't want to take it away from others but I don't want to be subjected to it. Don't need the knob if enabling one required affirmative action, but that's apparently not the case as sites such as getpersonas so ably demonstrates. Reproducible: Always
Sure it's possible. Go to Tools->Add-Ons->Themes and unistall the theme (a persona is a light weight theme). And you are prompted before you install it. And there's an Undo button if you decide to remove it completely (in the strip below the toolbar). And there's a Manage button that takes you to the Add-Ons dialog box. And there's a link called "How do I remove this Persona?" immediately after you install a new one.
Status: UNCONFIRMED → RESOLVED
Closed: 15 years ago
Resolution: --- → WORKSFORME
Thank you, but you are missing the point I was trying to make. I know you can remove and individual persona. That's all well and good. It is not good that personas were integrated into the software in such a way that a web site (supposedly limited to getpersonas.com at this point) can change the persona at will - that's just asking for trouble. Just like people get upset with other entities about installing add-ons without asking I don't want a web site to be able to change my persona or potentially do so. Right now I have no way of stopping it. I understand that it is supposedly limited to those sites whitelisted for add-ons but thats not good enough. It should take my positive action to activate one of these things. Hovering over one is not my positive action. If it can be done that way it will be done in loads of other ways. This is a misfeature in its current incarnation.
Status: RESOLVED → UNCONFIRMED
Resolution: WORKSFORME → ---
(In reply to comment #2) > It is not good that personas were integrated into the software in such a way > that a web site (supposedly limited to getpersonas.com at this point) can > change the persona at will - that's just asking for trouble. Indeed a website cannot change it without your consent. > Hovering over one is not my positive action. It is just a preview once you leave the image on the page it will go away and not remembered obviously. You have to explicitely click Wear It to actually install the Persona.
Status: UNCONFIRMED → RESOLVED
Closed: 15 years ago → 15 years ago
Resolution: --- → WORKSFORME
This feature is completely useless for me. My undestanding of FF is a lightwight browser. If I want a theme tool I have to install one, but put these extension into core makes FF fater and full of useless code (for me) and decreases the security. There are so many extension which should go into the core, but this is only my opinion. So, please remove this "feature" from the core or make it removeable for the user.
blueduck, how does having personas decrease security or slow the browser down?
If you don't like it, you can just not use it, its weight on the browser is really not-existent. Maybe you also don't use Themes, then we should remove themes support that is even heavier? Do you use Microsummaries? I mean, there are lot of features, not all users will use all of them, still you have a browser with one more feature and it's also 20% faster, that looks like a "win win" to me.
Personas in and of themselves are not an issue. The ability of a web site to alter your gui without affirmative action is a problem in a number of regards. The potential annoyance factor alone should be sufficient to see the need to be able to disable this feature. Add to that the potential mischief that could show up down the road and it seems only sensible. It should not be possible for a site to alter the GUI unless the user requests it,
The website in question, MUST be explicitly whitelisted. Only getPersonas site can do that. And you halso HAVE to click a button to confirm the change. So what? Be sure that eventual security issues are being taking in count, changes will be done IF they will be needed. Btw, you should bring your points to the newgroup moz.dev.apps.firefox since this is not the right place to discuss about features.
Marco, with respect, you have made this assertion before but its not completely accurate. Yes, you must affirmatively do something to make it stick when you leave the site. But the fact that a site can change your gui when you hover over an element is a problem. The potential for abuse seems high. If you are telling me that removing getpersonas.com from the white list will completely disable this ability great, where do I do that? Seems kind of a kludge and non-intuitive but fine. I would recommend that it not come white listed by default. I would prefer, and I think its advisable, that there be a boolean in prefs along the lines of lightweightThemes.preview.enabled.
in preferences you can go to Security and remove getPersonas from the list of websites that don't have to notify you when they try to install components. That's easy and will do exactly what you want.
Every additional code must be maintained and is a potential leak for exploits. Here you must see the pros and cons: In a browser should be parts to render a website, drawing a gui, ... and having an extension API. Any additionally feature could covered by an extension. I must admitted that I like the standard theme, so nowadays I don´t care about other themes, but few years ago I want to clone the Mac style on a linux FF. It was no problem to found the right theme and use it. I think that is the point I don´t understand: Why we need a built-in theme chooser when there still is one who do his work. Personas is no replacement. I don´t see the advantages of it. Changing theme more then twice a day is really strange behavior. If people do, ok its there right, but why this feature must built-in the core? I never said it slows the browser down, so i can´t talk about this point.
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