701650 - The “When updates to Firefox are found” setting group should not be disabled if it has an effect.

Status: UNCONFIRMED

(Firefox :: Settings UI, defect)

Description

[os3476]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_7_2) AppleWebKit/534.51.22 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.1.1 Safari/534.51.22

Steps to reproduce:

I unchecked “Automatically check for updates” (everything) in Preferences → Advanced → Update. Then I checked for updates in the about box.


Actual results:

Unchecking Firefox in “Automatically check for updates” disabled the radio buttons and check boxes under “When updates to Firefox are found”, keeping their value of “Automatically download and install updates” and “Warn me if this will disable any of my add-ons”. This implies (standard UI behavior) that these settings have no effect, but as we will see, it’s not the case.

Then when checking for updates, it was automatically installed.

However, setting “When updates to Firefox are found” to “Ask me what to do” prior to disabling automatic updates does not automatically install updates when they are checked in the about box. Therefore this setting is honoured even when it is disabled.


Expected results:

Since the value of the “When updates to Firefox are found” radio buttons is honoured by Check for updates even if “Automatically check for updates” is disabled, these controls should stay enabled.

Indeed, the user will want to change it if he notices it’s not doing what he wants, and checking “Automatically check for updates”, changing the “When updates to Firefox are found” setting and unchecking “Automatically check for updates” again is not the right way to have him do that.

Summary: The “When updates to Firefox are found” control group should stay enabled regardless of the state of the “Automatically check for updates” checkboxes.

Of course, the behaviour described here was observed in version 7.0.1, since there are no updated to version 8 yet to test it. But in version 8, the aforementioned controls are still disabled, so the issue applies to 8.