643991 - properly handle UX when user navigates away from a shared page prior to error

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Cloud Services :: Share: Firefox Client, defect)

Description

[James Burke]

In talking over use cases with Bryan, we came up with some error cases that have some problems given the current add-on implementation. How can the user recover if:

1) User navigates to another page and share of previous page ends up failing? Right now they will see an error, but after the error, the share panel is reset to the current page info and not the previous page that had the error.

2) If they close the tab while the share is still trying to complete?

This seems to indicate that the share data should be stored in a add-on global area indexed by URL, and not store the data on the tab.

Then, the error notification bar should displayed in whatever tab the user is currently viewing. If the "fix it" button is clicked, then focus on the tab that has the URL that failed, and if there is no tab with the right URL, pop a new tab to that URL. Make sure the share panel is open showing the error.

Comment 1

[Shane Caraveo (:mixedpuppy)]

Attachment: rel=shorturl patch

Comment 2

[Shane Caraveo (:mixedpuppy)]

ignore patch, getting too trigger happy, thought I was on a different bug tab

Comment 3

[Bryan Clark (DevTools PM) [:clarkbw]]

(In reply to comment #0)
Just to clarify this a bit after talking with FF UX.

In either case, 1) or 2), the issue is that a person has lost the original tab or page they were sharing (by clicking on a link or closing the tab) and the share failed for some reason in between sharing and losing the tab/page.

Firefox doesn't currently have a central place where we could inform the user of an issue like this.  Once we inform the user we want to reopen the erroneous tab/page for the person to retry the share.

So for now we will just open the page which wasn't shared successfully in a background tab.  This avoids interrupting the person in whatever new task they were doing but does risk that they won't see the new tab opened.  

UX requested that we indicate on the tab (similar to how app tabs light up) that the background tab we've opened is an error in sharing.

The background tab can behave exactly as an share error using a notification bar to indicate the problem.

Comment 4

[Philipp von Weitershausen [:philikon]]

This was fixed as part of bug 644182 and landed in https://hg.mozilla.org/users/pweitershausen_mozilla.com/fx-share/rev/8a55957fb65e

Comment 5

[Philipp von Weitershausen [:philikon]]

Tests committed in https://hg.mozilla.org/users/pweitershausen_mozilla.com/fx-share/rev/e7ead4b2cb0b