Closed Bug 791485 Opened 12 years ago Closed 6 years ago

Allow marking add-ons "must have" to avoid incompatible updates

Categories

(Toolkit :: Add-ons Manager, enhancement)

15 Branch
x86_64
All
enhancement
Not set
normal

Tracking

()

RESOLVED WONTFIX

People

(Reporter: don, Unassigned)

Details

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:14.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/14.0.1
Build ID: 20120713134347

Steps to reproduce:

Updated FF to Version 15


Actual results:

The FloatNotes add-on stopped working correctly.  Notes that I'd created previously couldn't be edited.


Expected results:

I should have been able to say in effect: "this add-on is important to me; please don't try to update FF until a compatible version of it is available."

In this case, the FloatNotes author has acknowledged that he's not sure whether he can make it compatible with 15.x.  While I'd like to stay updated, the add-on's functionality is more important to me.  I'm requesting a feature: allow the user to mark add-ons such as this whose loss would cripple his use of FF.  The FF update facility would respect such marks and simply notify the user that the update is postponed until the add-on has been updated.

(As a side effect, this could be a way to raise the priority of folding frequently marked add-ons into the core functionality, or include them into the update process.)
Severity: normal → enhancement
For what it's worth, my workaround was to revert back to 14.0.1, where I'll stay until FloatNotes is compatible with whatever the latest version is.
Component: Untriaged → Add-ons Manager
OS: Windows 7 → All
Product: Firefox → Toolkit
Version: 1.5.0.x Branch → 15 Branch
(In reply to Dwig from comment #1)
> For what it's worth, my workaround was to revert back to 14.0.1, where I'll
> stay until FloatNotes is compatible with whatever the latest version is.

I wouldn't recommend staying with an older unsupported browser version for too long. There's a few reasons why listed here:
http://www.upsdell.com/BrowserNews/why.htm

Due to security reasons, it's always recommended to have the last version.

Unfortunately, this enhancement is not really doable, as advising a user of Firefox to not upgrade to the supported version isn't exaclty healthy (for the reasons listed above). 
In these cases, the add-on developer is the only one which can provide a working version to help your needs.
Status: UNCONFIRMED → RESOLVED
Closed: 12 years ago
Resolution: --- → WONTFIX
Virgil,

Thanks for the reply.  

In response to "this enhancement is not really doable, as advising a user of Firefox to not upgrade to the supported version isn't exaclty healthy (for the reasons listed above).":

The spirit of this enhancement is not for FF to "advise the user not to upgrade", but to give the user a way to say "I understand the risks, and the loss of functionality that would be entailed by upgrading, in my case, outweighs them", and to have FF honor that statement by the user.  In the immediate case, my way of stating this has been to submit an enhancement request; far from ideal, I'll admit.

A further benefit of this enhancement could be obtained if such choices were tallied for each extension.  Extensions that large numbers of users have thereby marked could be considered to be priorities to be part of an upgrade.  (Or at least to notify the author, or someone else who could and would upgrade the extension.)

I hereby request a more sympathetic treatment of this request, and reopening it.  Or, at the very least, tell me where I can post to get a wider discussion of this very real issue.  To repeat, loss of some kinds of functionality can, for some users, be more important than the risks of not being "up-to-date".
Dwig, you can also re-open it yourself. As long as you are stating your arguments, there is no problem in that at all.

I'm still sticking to the initial point, I can understand that incompatible add-ons provide lots of frustration, but sticking to an outdated version and taking such risks is not the way to go.
Status: RESOLVED → UNCONFIRMED
Resolution: WONTFIX → ---
To echo the comment 2, upgrading the browser won't be prevented due to add-ons. Further now that we have WebExtensions the compat. issues should be very rare.
Status: UNCONFIRMED → RESOLVED
Closed: 12 years ago6 years ago
Resolution: --- → WONTFIX
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