832146 - Indication of Sync activity/progress

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Firefox :: Sync, enhancement, P2)

Description

[Faisal N. Jawdat]

I have no idea if Sync is done or even doing anything. Sync could use some sort of indicator that Firefox is fully synchronized, so I know it's safe to put my machine to sleep.

Comment 1

[Dan Callahan [:callahad]]

FWIW, we've had 5 people stop by #sync with issues related to "is it done yet?" or "did it succeed?" in the past month, so this is still an issue.

Comment 2

[Richard Newman [:rnewman]]

Using the Australis customization feature, you can put a Sync icon on your toolbar. It goes blue and spins while syncing. Does that help?

Comment 3

[Dan Callahan [:callahad]]

I wish it did, but the weekly questions about Sync progress seem to indicate otherwise.

All of the information is there (the time of last sync is available on the button's tooltip), but it's evidently not very discoverable.

I wonder if we could somehow indicate the status in the Sync preference panel ("Syncing now..." or "Last sync: ...") and/or on the signed in label inside the hamburger menu?

A common failure mode is "I just set up sync on both my devices, and I don't see my other tabs / bookmarks /etc! Help!" Without that initial, very visible indication of progress, folks seem to expect instant results.

Comment 4

[Richard Newman [:rnewman]]

This is why we added Bug 675824, fwiw.

Comment 5

[Mark Hammond [:markh] [:mhammond]]

From an engineering POV, adding a "last synced at" notification to the hamburger menu etc would be relatively easy.  Doing that while keeping the hamburger menu "pretty" might be more challenging :)

Ryan, can we get some UX perspective here?

Comment 6

[Ryan Feeley [:rfeeley]]

What about a tooltip over the email address in the menu? Currently it just repeats the email address.

Comment 7

[Ryan Feeley [:rfeeley]]

The implementation was that we show the date in the tooltip over the Sync icon (which is now also animated). Fixed, no?

Comment 8

[Mark Hammond [:markh] [:mhammond]]

SGTM!

(I'll actually just mark it as WFM seeing this bug didn't actually fix it - if I wasn't so lazy I'd find the bug to dupe this to)