603804 - Don't include add-ons in fragment when metadata updates are disabled

Status: VERIFIED FIXED

(Toolkit :: Add-ons Manager, defect)

Description

[Justin Scott [:fligtar]]

If the user has turned off metadata updates for add-ons in Firefox, we should also no longer show them personal recommendations. In order to make this opt-out process as easy as possible and retain state, we should make this same action turn off Discovery Pane's knowledge of what add-ons are installed.

So if the user has turned off metadata updates, we should not append the installed add-ons fragment to the Discovery Pane URL.

Comment 1

[Dave Townsend [:mossop] (he/him)]

If you're looking for another easy fix Margaret, this is such a bug.

Comment 2

[Dave Townsend [:mossop] (he/him)]

Attachment: patch rev 1

Pretty straightforward, also added better testing that the hash data contains what we would expect.

Comment 3

[Dave Townsend [:mossop] (he/him)]

Landed: http://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/rev/25f346a28ba8

Comment 4

[Henrik Skupin (:whimboo) [⌚️UTC+2]]

Dave, as it looks like we only check for the background update pref but do not take into account extensions.getAddons.cache.enabled. Users can still have automatic updates enabled for all add-ons but don't want to let the add-on meta data updated. In those cases we still send all the information to the Discovery Pane.

Comment 5

[Dave Townsend [:mossop] (he/him)]

That's true but as we don't expose that setting in the UI I don't think it is much of an issue.

Comment 6

[Henrik Skupin (:whimboo) [⌚️UTC+2]]

(In reply to comment #5)
> That's true but as we don't expose that setting in the UI I don't think it is
> much of an issue.

Ok, I have checked the updated privacy policy (http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/legal/privacy/firefox.html) for Firefox and found the following sentence:

This communication only happens when the Get Add-ons area is open and can be turned off at any time by opting out of Automatic Updates from the Add-ons Manager.

So you are right, and we should only stop sending fragments when the user has been opt-out from automatic updates. I will retest now.

Comment 7

[Henrik Skupin (:whimboo) [⌚️UTC+2]]

As talked with Dave on IRC we have a pretty broken strategy here and the privacy policy is also wrong in some points. Dave will come up with a proposal later today.

Comment 8

[Henrik Skupin (:whimboo) [⌚️UTC+2]]

Ok, so disabling sending the fragments only works by setting extensions.update.enabled to false at the moment. That's not what we want in general and will be covered by bug 635115.

Verified fixed based on the manual setting of the preference with Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.6; rv:2.0b12pre) Gecko/20110216 Firefox/4.0b12pre