901553 - Stop prompting users to enable system addons

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Toolkit :: Add-ons Manager, defect)

Description

[Benjamin Smedberg]

Per the recent thread on mozilla.addons.user-experience, we have decided to stop prompting users to enable addons which are discovered via system install (side-loaded). These should still appear in the addon manager if the user wants to explicitly enable them.

I think that this means we can get rid of about:newaddon and the machinery to support it, but I'm not 100% sure of that. It also means that bug 879480 is WONTFIX or we should morph it into the thing that Asa discussed of giving users a link to the AMO install of integration addons. Please correct if I'm wrong in those assumptions.

Comment 1

[Jorge Villalobos [:jorgev] (he/him)]

I don't think that thread has reached its conclusion, and I don't think we have data to support such a disruptive change. I certainly don't agree with taking this approach unless we have facts that support it's necessary.

Comment 2

[Jorge Villalobos [:jorgev] (he/him)]

Let's keep the policy discussion about this in the newsgroup, please.

Comment 3

[Asa Dotzler [:asa]]

This change has Brendan's support if it's desired by team Firefox. Ending this assault on our users, IMO, the single biggest positive impact we can make for Firefox users in the near term and without significant engineering investment.  Gavin, Johnathan, Madhava, over to y'all for a decision.

Comment 4

[Jorge Villalobos [:jorgev] (he/him)]

I'll just reiterate that there's a very lengthy discussion about this in the addons.user-experience newsgroup:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/mozilla.addons.user-experience/48q3mGXpdJg
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/mozilla.addons.user-experience/HG44n4ZWzhA

The general consensus is that we shouldn't do this, because it punishes the developers who are willing to follow our policies, while doing nothing to prevent bad actors from continuing to sidestep the install flow we currently allow. We believe that this will only push legitimate actors to force-install their add-ons, putting us in a position where we will have to decide if we want to blocklist very widely-installed add-ons that many users may not want to do without.

We also think that the current external install UI gives users enough information to make a decision, though it certainly could be improved (bug 834385, bug 769495).

We have also repeatedly asked for data that shows that these add-ons (externally installed add-ons that respect the opt-in flow) are currently such a huge problem for users. The (admittedly limited) data we have been working with shows the contrary.

Comment 5

[Asa Dotzler [:asa]]

Jorge, (module owner for add-ons?) answered my question. Thanks, Jorge. How about marking this bug WONTFIX then.