847980 - Site settings should be a real settings page

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Firefox for Android Graveyard :: General, defect)

Description

[Wesley Johnston (:wesj)]

Looking a few bugs that have come through for site settings, I remember that I hate site settings. I think we should just make it a real settings page.

I find the current interaction confusing as its not really a set of settings, its a set of things you can clear, more like our clear history dialog. When I see:

Geolocation   X

I assume it means geolocation is enabled when really it means, "Hitting this button will clear the Geo setting".

In addition to making it a nice settings page, it would also give users a place to go back to for doorhangers they ignored, for addons to plug in, showing page data usage (bug 699577), a built in error console, etc?

Comment 1

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

I might be misunderstanding the idea here, but making it a settings page would make it difficult for people to know "these settings are for the current page open in the active tab". We use the current system to make it easy for the user to associate the settings with the current page.

Is your idea to keep the current menu (long tap on URLbar) and dialog, but use something that looks more like a standard "settings" UI? Or would you have the user need to go to the "Settings" activity to change these values?

Comment 2

[Wesley Johnston (:wesj)]

My idea was to use a real android settings page, with the url shown in the title (like we do now). Things often confuse users that don't confuse me though.

Alternatively, I wondered if we could just do an about:page for these. Or we could just alter the current dialog to be less of a "clear this stuff" dialog and more of a "prefs" dialog (i.e. hitting a button flipped geo on and off).

Comment 3

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

I think it's important to not leave the page, so I don't like an about: page. If we create a secondary UI, where we list URLs/Domains and the perms for each, then we could take the user away from the content.

Comment 4

[:Margaret Leibovic]

(In reply to Mark Finkle (:mfinkle) from comment #3)
> I think it's important to not leave the page, so I don't like an about:
> page. If we create a secondary UI, where we list URLs/Domains and the perms
> for each, then we could take the user away from the content.

I agree we need to keep a solution for while the user in on the current page. And we would definitely want some UX help if we were going to make an about:permissions kind of page.

But I definitely agree the current site settings dialog is confusing. We should improve it :)

Comment 5

[Wesley Johnston (:wesj)]

Attachment: WIP

I started on something like this while I waited for ians prefs refresh. The idea here is that we can show 'Site Settings' inside our normal settings pane. Similar to what Chrome does. This adds a row in the 'Content' section. When you open it it shows a list of hosts. Clicking one of those shows a set of settings for that particular host. i.e.

[Store Passwords  ]
[  Always Ask     ]

etc. Desktop's about:permissions has a ton of these for a bunch of domains. They've also got some neat things that I think our users might like ("Clear passwords for this site") and some we might not want (Password and cookie management?). There is active talk there about revamping it to make things less confusing for users as well. I think I probably need some UX guidance before I plow on much further.

Comment 6

[bug.zilla]

Hi, is this still being looked into?
Also, agree that there should be a dedicated page but not too "hidden"

Comment 7

[:Margaret Leibovic]

Robin has been looking at the site settings interaction over in bug 1044401. I'm tempted to dupe this bug there, but this seems like a bigger project than the more minimal improvements proposed in bug 1044401. Marking a dependency just so we don't lose track of this. We should try to address this issue as part of our menu/settings improvements.

Comment 8

[:Margaret Leibovic]

I don't think it's worth it to do this, seeing as desktop still hasn't figured out a way to ship about:permissions as a piece of primary UI.

We can revisit this if we decide that users actually want a way to see permissions they've granted for all sites, but I think fixing bug 1044401 will give us most of the user value we're looking for.