820856 - Quit menu item should be shown on phones with hardware menu buttons

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Firefox for Android Graveyard :: General, defect)

Description

[Wesley Johnston (:wesj)]

I brought this up two or three times in bug 800071 because I was worried it would be overlooked, and it was. On phones that have hardware menu buttons (and hence don't have a dedicated task switcher button) we should still show the quit button. There is a hidden task switcher on those phones, but I doubt it gets much use because its hidden, leaving those users with no way to quit the app.

Comment 1

[Mark Finkle (:mfinkle) (use needinfo?)]

Is the hidden task switcher activated by long pressing on the Home button?

Comment 2

[Wesley Johnston (:wesj)]

yep

Comment 3

[Wesley Johnston (:wesj)]

Attachment: Patch

Comment 4

[Mark Finkle (:mfinkle) (use needinfo?)]

Comment on attachment 691457 [details] [diff] [review]
Patch

This patch looks good, but I'm not 100% sure we want it. I am fairly well trained to use the long press on the Home button. We wanted to remove the "Quit" menu to cleanup the menu and fit in with guidelines too.

If we only remove "Quit" from a subset of the devices running ICS+, then maybe the confusion is not worth it either.

r+, but let's get some UX feedback here

Comment 5

[Brian Nicholson (:bnicholson)]

I agree with Wes's concerns. I've talked to a few non-technical users who have ICS phones with hardware buttons, and none of them knew about the long press recent apps list. FWIW, though, they were happy to learn about it and use it frequently now when an app misbehaves.

Comment 6

[Ian Barlow (:ibarlow)]

I really don't want to do this. I realize there are discoverability issues with the system app switcher, but the bigger problem I have is that Android apps just aren't meant to have Quit actions built in like this. 

This feels more like a need an add-on could fill for a niche group of users, not something that would be deemed so necessary by the vast majority that it would be promoted into the menu UI by default.

Comment 7

[Brian Nicholson (:bnicholson)]

Something else worth mentioning is that is on my Droid RAZR (which is ICS with a HW keyboard), the *stock* browser has an Exit button in the menu. I thought that was interesting - not sure if it's a phone-specific modification.

Comment 8

[Ian Barlow (:ibarlow)]

Interesting. I'm not seeing it in Stock Browser on my Galaxy Nexus running JB. 

Brian do other apps on your phone have an exit button?

Comment 9

[Mark Finkle (:mfinkle) (use needinfo?)]

I am beginning to think we should just always use "Quit" or always hide "Quit". Trying to juggle hiding on some devices and showing on others and the rules used to determine the visibility will confuse users, as well as us. And we look in consistent.

"Fennec, I can't Quit you!"

Comment 10

[Kartikaya Gupta (email:[e-mail])]

I don't know if users switch between devices often enough for that to be a problem in practice.

Comment 11

[Brian Nicholson (:bnicholson)]

(In reply to Ian Barlow (:ibarlow) from comment #8)
> Interesting. I'm not seeing it in Stock Browser on my Galaxy Nexus running
> JB. 
> 
> Brian do other apps on your phone have an exit button?

Nope, just the stock browser. But looking at an HTC Rezound (also ICS with soft keys), I noticed its browser does not have an Exit button. I also fired up an ICS emulator with soft keys and I didn't see an Exit menu item, so it must just be my phone.

Comment 12

[Ian Barlow (:ibarlow)]

Oy. 

I agree with Mark, I don't really want to start special casing our UI to this degree on a phone by phone basis... 

How do we feel about the idea of some kind of App Quitter add-on, that can be placed in the menu if people want it?

Comment 13

[Mark Capella [:capella]]

fyi: reference add-on
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/android/addon/quitnow/?src=category
and similar bug 824507

Comment 14

[Iacopo Benesperi [:iacchi]]

Just my two cents: I'm not exactly a newbie, but since the quit menu item was removed from Firefox 20 I don't know anymore how to exit nicely. I'm on a ICS SGS2. Just pressing the home button shows the home screen but Fennec remains open. Reading this bug I tried to hold the menu button to show the app switcher but then what? If Fennec is the currently opened app it doesn't show up in it. I have to go to Activities management (or whatever it is called in English) and close the app from there. It looks like to many passages to just close an app.
Add that there's always been a quit menu item, and old user will be at a loss.

Comment 15

[Aaron Train [:aaronmt]]

(In reply to Iacopo Benesperi [:iacchi] from comment #14)
> Just my two cents: I'm not exactly a newbie, but since the quit menu item
> was removed from Firefox 20 I don't know anymore how to exit nicely. I'm on
> a ICS SGS2. Just pressing the home button shows the home screen but Fennec
> remains open. Reading this bug I tried to hold the menu button to show the
> app switcher but then what? If Fennec is the currently opened app it doesn't
> show up in it.

It's the Android 4.0 Recent Apps List [1], from that list, you can swipe applications in either direction to close them. It's fairly trivial, see → http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yhLS2piE2sE&hd=1

[1] http://developer.android.com/about/versions/android-4.0-highlights.html

Comment 16

[Iacopo Benesperi [:iacchi]]

Oh, ok, so you first have to press the button to show the home screen, then hold it to show the app switcher, swipe to close it and press the home button again. I was skipping the first step. Anyway, it takes a long time to do all this and even if it's more android-style, a quit menu item is just much faster and immediate imho.

Comment 17

[Kartikaya Gupta (email:[e-mail])]

(In reply to Iacopo Benesperi [:iacchi] from comment #16)
> Oh, ok, so you first have to press the button to show the home screen, then
> hold it to show the app switcher, swipe to close it and press the home
> button again. I was skipping the first step.

On some devices you don't need to go to the home screen, but on some devices the foreground app doesn't show up in the switcher :(

> Anyway, it takes a long time to
> do all this and even if it's more android-style, a quit menu item is just
> much faster and immediate imho.

FWIW, I agree.

Ian, are you *really* sure you don't want the quit menu item back? In general (ever since the "tabs-on-top" fiasco) I feel like we should have some process for backing out changes like this once a certain number/percentage of users complain about it. Whatever the advantages of doing it, there is some point where annoying/losing users is no longer worth it, and we should reconsider. I'm not saying that the quit menu item is at that point yet, but we should at least define what that point is.

Comment 18

[Ian Barlow (:ibarlow)]

I think every scenario is going to be a little different. Our process for handling these decisions will likely continue to look like what we did earlier today in IRC -- discussion across product / eng / UX, and hopefully we can come to a consensus on what to do.

In this case, it's
1. Leave the quit button out
2. Promote the QuitNow add-on on about:home.