727985 - remove compability checking dialog from start up

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Toolkit :: Add-ons Manager, defect)

Description

[Daniel Desira]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; Win64; x64; rv:13.0a1) Gecko/20120209 Firefox/13.0a1
Build ID: 20120209031242

Steps to reproduce:

I switched to Aurora from Nightly for a while. I usually switch back and forth between stable releases, Aurora and Nightly.


Actual results:

Each time I switch between versions I am greeted by the "Check for incompatible add-ons" dialog at start-up.


Expected results:

This dialog should be ditched since it is of no use. Since the add-ons will be disabled anyway, we should find another strategy which tells the user about incompatible add-ons after the browser has started and with minimal interruptions of the user's workflow. Then Firefox should check for add-on updates silently.

I know non-techie people who think Firefox is too complicated to use because of such dialogs. I find this dialog a bit irritating myself since I switch between versions frequently and often choose to skip the check. Thus this makes it difficult to convince my friends to switch from Chrome or IE.

I can do a mockup and add it to this bug if requested.

Comment 1

[Dave Townsend [:mossop]]

(In reply to Daniel Desira from comment #0)
> This dialog should be ditched since it is of no use. Since the add-ons will
> be disabled anyway, we should find another strategy which tells the user
> about incompatible add-ons after the browser has started and with minimal
> interruptions of the user's workflow.

The problem is that we don't know whether the add-ons should be disabled or not (or if there are new compatible versions of them that could be installed) without contacting AMO, and that requires either blocking startup until it is complete, or telling the user they need to restart immediately after starting up once those changes are applied.

Now there certainly is scope for being smarter about deciding if we need to show this dialog or not though. We could for example not show it if there has been a relatively recent update check made for all add-ons, then we can assume that AMO has no useful new data for us I think. We could also not show it if all installed add-ons are eligible for compatible by default, though we'd have to think carefully about how recent the blacklist we have is there (this dialog collects that currently too). These are probably worthy separate bugs to be filed and I'll let Blair decide what to do with them.

We could of course also just say that it is better to ask users to restart after starting up and not show this dialog at all and get rid of this entirely, though again the compatibility blacklist is a problem that would need to be solved there.

Comment 2

[Andrew Swan [:aswan]]

No longer an issue post-bug 1353194