961285 - Can't switch to Metro when permanent private browsing (clear everything on shutdown) is enabled in desktop

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(Firefox for Metro Graveyard :: General, defect)

Description

[gedagenand]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.3) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/32.0.1700.76 Safari/537.36

Steps to reproduce:

In the desktop mode, I went to the settings and set to clear all of the history (everything), I ticked all the boxes I could.


Actual results:

The option to launch firefox in Windows 8 Mode disappeared from the main menu (top left corner blue Aurora button main menu).

When I changed back the clear history settings, the option to launch in Windows 8 Mode also came back.


Expected results:

The option to launch in Windows 8 Mode should not have disappeared.

Comment 1

[Matt Brubeck (:mbrubeck)]

Did you choose the "Always use private browsing mode" option from the Privacy section of the desktop Aurora settings?

We deliberately disable the "Relaunch in Windows 8 Touch" command in private windows (bug 928068), because it currently works by saving the session to disk, then reading it from disk when the Windows 8 app starts.  We can't do this in Private Browsing windows because Private Browsing disables saving any browsing data to disk.

Perhaps when permanent Private Browsing is enabled, we should display the menu item anyway.  Using it would discard all of your current tabs and history and start up a brand new session in "Windows 8 Touch" mode.

Comment 2

[gedagenand]

I chose "Never remember history". Aurora restarted and stated below: "Aurora will use the same settings as private browsing, and will not remember any history as you browse the Web."

OK, I understand that this isn't a bug, so thanks for the fast reply.

However, I am a simple end-user, not a technician and not a developer... The disappearance of an important new feature without any explanation why (and after 'enabling' never remembering history), not even greying it off, forced me to start looking over and over again what went wrong - because I had no clue. I uninstalled, traced back my steps... and it all looked just like a bug to me.

Your suggestions seems ok to me - "We should display the menu item anyway." - or simply pop up a message or have a written warning that the Windows 8 Mode will be disabled. Anything that will indicate the simple user that this is deliberate. Otherwise, many others will be frustrated looking for the "missing" feature.

Comment 3

[Matt Brubeck (:mbrubeck)]

We should keep the "relaunch in Windows 8 Touch" command disabled in private windows for now, since Firefox for Windows 8 Touch does not yet implement private browsing or related privacy features (bug 771188).  We don't want Firefox users to accidentally or unknowingly disable these privacy features by switching to the Win8/Metro app.

After bug 771188 is fixed, we can enable the "relaunch in Windows 8 Touch" command in private desktop windows, and make it launch Metro with the same privacy setting.  We should also make sure the other options in the "clear data on shutdown" section are honored.

Comment 4

[Firefox Bug Husbandry Bot]

Mass close of bugs in obsolete product https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1350354