628080 - Change the default setting for "warn me when closing tabs" ?

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Firefox :: General, defect)

Description

[Alex Faaborg [:faaborg] (Firefox UX)]

A few recent changes have led to us potentially wanting to revisit this behavior:

-bug 592822, remove quit warning dialog box
-merging panorama groups and multiple windows

We may want to change the default setting of displaying a warning dialog box to false (or as bug 550559 proposes, only display a warning when the user closed the window using a keyboard shortcut, under the assumption that a mouse action is more intentional).

Comment 1

[Paul [pwd]]

I have never accidentally closed a window with my keyboard, only with my mouse.

Comment 2

[Josh Matthews [:jdm]]

On linux, at the very least, Ctr+Q quits Firefox immediately, and it's really easy to fat-finger when trying to switch tabs or close the current one.

Comment 3

[Alex Limi (:limi) — Firefox UX Team]

I think we ended up with recommending what's outlined in bug 550559. I refined the title and the outcome, we want to warn on quitting via the keyboard, but not using the menu or mouse.

Comment 4

[Frédéric Buclin]

(In reply to comment #3)
> we want to warn on quitting via the keyboard, but
> not using the menu or mouse.

I really don't see the rationale. People are used to be able to confirm that they want their session back next time they restart Firefox. They know that next time, everything will be back. But in beta 10, the session is silently saved, and on restart, you don't see your tabs back, making you panic! I had to come on IRC and ask what happened with Firefox. I had no idea that I could restore my previous session, because it's not intuitive to have to open a menu to bring the session back. Are you assuming your users are clever enough to just know? I know that you plan to fix bug 627301, but it's very common to not have the default Firefox Start page as your default page, e.g. at work where the default page points to the website of the company. As I said in bug 627301, automatically saving the session is a great thing (though I'm not sure that from a security and privacy point of view, it's good that the next user using your computer can see what you visited, especially on public computers!), but not knowing how to restore it makes the feature pretty useless. Why do people need to learn the hard way (e.g. by losing all their tabs at least once) how new features work?

The default should be "true".

Comment 5

[Alex Limi (:limi) — Firefox UX Team]

Thanks for your comments! The situation is a little more complex than it seems at first:

(In reply to comment #4)
> I really don't see the rationale. People are used to be able to confirm that
> they want their session back next time they restart Firefox. They know that
> next time, everything will be back.

The downside is that most people have no idea what to answer for this dialog box, and it generally gets in the way of them shutting down their computer or ending what they were doing. We aren't the typical users (keeping a lot of tabs around for long periods of time as to-do lists, web apps, etc).

> But in beta 10, the session is silently
> saved, and on restart, you don't see your tabs back, making you panic!

Yes, beta10 is missing the link to session restore.

> I had to
> come on IRC and ask what happened with Firefox. I had no idea that I could
> restore my previous session, because it's not intuitive to have to open a menu
> to bring the session back. Are you assuming your users are clever enough to
> just know? I know that you plan to fix bug 627301, but it's very common to not
> have the default Firefox Start page as your default page, e.g. at work where
> the default page points to the website of the company.

Indeed, but if you have changed that page, you have probably seen the "Restore my windows and tabs from last time". It's not perfect, of course — there will be some edge cases where people are confused in the beginning. For the record, this is how several other browsers already work.

> As I said in bug 627301,
> automatically saving the session is a great thing (though I'm not sure that
> from a security and privacy point of view, it's good that the next user using
> your computer can see what you visited, especially on public computers!), 

They already can, unless you turned off or cleared history.

> not knowing how to restore it makes the feature pretty useless. Why do people
> need to learn the hard way (e.g. by losing all their tabs at least once) how
> new features work?

There might be a way to make this more visible for users that upgraded, but I also suspect that the people that really use session restore heavily already ticked the "don't ask me again", and just have it turned on — and the people that don't, probably don't want to deal with it.

If you can see a way to make the upgrade experience smoother, I'm all ears — but overall, this is a virtuous change in the default behavior (faster startup, less dialog boxes that get in your way, etc).

Comment 6

[Frédéric Buclin]

(In reply to comment #5)
> If you can see a way to make the upgrade experience smoother, I'm all ears —
> but overall, this is a virtuous change in the default behavior (faster startup,
> less dialog boxes that get in your way, etc).

See, my girlfriend asked me to upgrade her Firefox, and as a consequence I lost all her tabs she had for her job (after I commented to this bug). So to make us win a few tenths of seconds or a few seconds at most, she is going to waste a part of the evening trying to find these pages again (and I hope she is going to be able to find them all, because she needs them). A few seconds win versus several hours lost.... I personally consider this as a better measurement of Firefox performance than to win the race against Google Chrome because you are 20 ms faster to some unrealistic benchmark. Sorry, but having to tell her to do all her searches on the web again makes me a bit upset.

Comment 7

[Tony Mechelynck [:tonymec]]

(In reply to Alex Limi (:limi) — Firefox UX Team from comment #5)
[…]
> There might be a way to make this more visible for users that upgraded, but
> I also suspect that the people that really use session restore heavily
> already ticked the "don't ask me again", and just have it turned on — and
> the people that don't, probably don't want to deal with it.

You "suspect" that "most"… What follows may be based on thin air and guesswork for all I know, yet it is hard to disprove because it is guarded. The only user whose behaviour I can check easily — me — uses session restore heavily, wants the confirm dialog there, and never ticked that checkbox, but this doesn't disprove your suspiction: I might quite well be an exception in this respect.

I'll venture a guess of my own though: I suspect that users of Firefox and/or Thunderbird and/or SeaMonkey are of all kinds and tastes. Some want the confirm dialog, others not; some use session restore heavily, others occasionally, others not at all; and so on. Mozilla products fit them well because the Mozilla Mission is (or is supposed to be) about giving the user more power, more control, more certainty that they'll be able to make their own choices and have them enforced. Whatever the default, a sizable fraction of them will want the opposite.

> 
> If you can see a way to make the upgrade experience smoother, I'm all ears —
> but overall, this is a virtuous change in the default behavior (faster
> startup, less dialog boxes that get in your way, etc).

Here's my take on this subject:
1) set the default however you like, but make sure that there is an easily discoverable UI — typically somewhere under one of Tools→Options, Edit→Preferences or <appname>→Preferences depending on platform — not only to clear the setting but also to set it back, even repeatedly. About:config is a step in the right direction but it isn't good enough. A checkbox in the "Are you sure?" dialog has one flaw: it doesn't allow for getting the dialog back after saying "Don't bother me with this anymore", so it needs _another_ checkbox for if the user changes his/her mind.
2) Whatever default you choose, let it stick. (Changing any boolean default once removes it from prefs.js, twice forces the behaviour to the new default, which might not be what the user wants, and which almost certainly will be the opposite of what a sizable portion of your users wanted. The exception are the few savvy users who put their important settings in user.js, possibly after having had preferences changed on them against their will.)

Comment 8

[:Gijs (he/him)]

We changed this a little while back.