926822 - Default browser should be opt-in in Nightly installer (possibly Aurora and Beta, too)

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Firefox :: Installer, defect)

Description

[Terrell Kelley]

When installing Nightly, the full installer automatically has "Make Nightly the  default browser" checked. As this version is explicitly for testing purposes only, and is not supposed to be a user's main browser, this checkmark should, by default, be unchecked. (Ideally, this checkmark would also be unchecked when starting Nightly, but I'm not sure it's possible to do that and still display the prompt.)

The reasoning is that we do not want to encourage users to use Nightly as their default browser, and it only inconveniences most testers who are not going to user it as their default browser. It's really easy to miss checkmarks like this in installers, and the user then has to go manually fix it when they discover the problem--which may not be for a while.

I do not know if this also affects the stub installer. I'm also not 100% sure if this should be also fixed for Aurora and Beta, but I personally Aurora at least should be this way. Beta might just be used by people who want to be on the bleeding edge--I've even seen people who want a new feature encouraged to use beta until the feature arrives in released Firefox.

But Nightly and Aurora should definitely be for testing only. If someone needs to test the default browser feature, they can easily explicitly enable it.

Comment 1

[Robert Strong (they/them - no direct email)]

Stephen, this is deigned per UX so it is a UX call. From the dev side I'd prefer to keep all of the installers as similar to the others so they are all using the same code paths to lessen and so there is less code complexity.

Comment 2

[Robert Strong (they/them - no direct email)]

Philipp, perhaps you could make the call on this?

Comment 3

[(Currently slow to respond) Philipp Sackl [:phlsa] (Firefox UX) please use needinfo]

I agree that we can change the default in the installer for Nightly.
Let's not touch Aurora and Beta at this point.

Comment 4

[Robert Strong (they/them - no direct email)]

The ability to set as default is being removed in bug 1272162 so resolving as wontfix.