590311 - Firefox Sync statusbar icon irremovable

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 594488

(Firefox :: General, defect)

Description

[Kroc Camen]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.6; rv:2.0b4) Gecko/20100818 Firefox/4.0b4
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.6; rv:2.0b4) Gecko/20100818 Firefox/4.0b4

Now you’re crossing the line. If there’s UI I hate, it’s UI for a privacy-problem feature that cannot be removed, cannot be disabled and seeks just to push a brand name and one-vendor only system. You’ve crossed the line of taste into tastelessness.

Provide a means to switch off sync’s presence in the UI. No menu item, no statusbar icon, no mention of its existence. I will never use it, just like the vast majority of users.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Open Firefox 4b4
2. Look in system tray
3. Who put that there!



You could add a button to the sync window to say "I don’t want to use Sync (you can enable it again in options)" (or add-ons perhaps).

Comment 1

[Mathias Bynens]

While I do appreciate the Sync feature and will probably use it when Firefox 4 gets a stable release, I agree, the Sync icon should be optional.

Please make it removable via a setting in the Preferences (or Tools › Options on Windows).

Comment 2

[Kroc Camen]

Sorry about the rage, but I thought about this last night and I realised that I switch a thousand or more people a year to Firefox; every single extra click I have to do to configure Firefox for each person is a burden to me. Having to explicitly switch OFF sync via preferences is not good enough for me personally, I’d rather switch users to Chrome where I need far less out-of-the-box tweaking.

Consider providing the sync options as part of the first-run import dialog so that I could disable sync without having to visit preferences. I will keep sync on for those users with Android / iPhones and multiple computers, but for a large number of people they have one computer that they barely use as it is and adding the burden of *yet one more username and password* is too much.

Comment 3

[msth67]

(In reply to comment #1)
>  the Sync icon should be optional.
> 
> Please make it removable via a setting in the Preferences (or Tools › Options
> on Windows).

I also can't justify that this (not fundamental,and IMO not so reassuring as far as privacy goes) extensions has to be built-in by default and can't be totally eliminated : if I wanted it,I could always retrieve it from the add-ons.

Comment 4

[Dave Garrett]

For beta 7 and after there's no more status bar and the Sync icon can be
added/removed/moved to the new addons bar or elsewhere as a normal toolbar
button.