Comments on: Eradicating Start Up Dialogs

By: ksamuel

ksamuel — Sat, 26 Jun 2010 10:19:06 +0000

Like others, I find other update dialogs is really annoying. At least make them non modal. Better, make them a tab. I heard they plan to do in on closing. Good.

Another one is the tab letting you know you are in offline mode but does not let you go back to online mode. Very boring. Because Firefox decides (often stupidely) to go “offline”, you have to clic on “File > Work Offline”. Every time you are connected without a network manager, it does that. At least put a one clic button go back to online mode in the error message. I don’t even know what is the purpose of offline mode anyway. Anybody knows ?

Eventually, one for Thunderbird, if you ever meet its team: why are all messages modal and not a yellow bar like in Firefox ? Every time Thunderbird starts before Wifi gets connected, I have to close 5 windows saying “can’t connect to bla.imap.com”. Very stupid and irritating.

Anyway, the work on Firefox 4 is very promissing. Good luck !

By: PBZ

PBZ — Sat, 20 Feb 2010 16:19:09 +0000

I agree with those who say that add-on updates should have the ability to be set as automatic, without confirmations needed before OR after installation! How annoying to have to go through all that each time you start Firefox. Why don’t they offer that option in your tools menu?

By: stefan

stefan — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 06:20:03 +0000

i’m with ben and jmdesp. app-modal HTTP password dialogs are a pain in the ass (even if they’re not necessarily startup dialogs).

some legacy systems still use basic auth, and as soon you have to browse to another page or even just switch to another tab to get the username/password out of the internal database, you’re stuck. opening another instance of ff is not nearly as nice as the tabmodal solution (gchrome shows how it should be done).

other than that, the startup dialogs (default browser, plugin updates) aren’t really a problem for me.

By: pjdkrunkt

pjdkrunkt — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 00:30:11 +0000

I think the Updates reminder is pretty annoying, as is the New Add-On Installed dialog, which does virtually nothing of use since it doesn’t focus itself to the Add-On which is installed. It seems to randomly appear with updated Extensions. I don’t think all updates should be automatic. There are actually really good reasons for not automatically updating everything… like if you know your system has compatibility issues so you are using an older version of an Add-On… while that may be only 0.5% of the users, what’s the point in screwing them? Automatic updates can be the default setting, but an opt-out is very important, and the opt-out should not cause the startup dialog.

Honestly the biggest reason to avoid the startup dialog is not speed. It’s confusion. Many people use machines where multiple people use the same machine and only one person understands how to do the maintenence end of the browser. Yeah I know Bill Gates wants everyone in the universe to use separate login profiles, but that’s just not the way the real world ends up working. Grandma and or co-workers who just want to check the weather shouldn’t be bothered with this stuff. In fact, many of these dialogs are worded to where inexperienced users might even fear that something bad is happening like a virus downloading itself… after all, how many times have we told them do NOT click on the OK button when you see a weird popup? I would dare say that the popup format itself lends to being misinterpreted as spyware simply because of it’s overuse for such purposes.

By: C

Sun, 20 Sep 2009 22:32:12 +0000

Wouldn’t it be quite easy to make all updates automatic. Just add options to disable automatic updates, and no one will complain.

By: Marcos Crispino

Marcos Crispino — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 17:24:02 +0000

1. Master password
2. Add-on update

By: cuz84d

cuz84d — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 19:31:00 +0000

Just like the previous comment, this idea using the InfoBar for more things makes a lot of sense, dropping the dialog before FF opens’ update Add-ons. Which is being done for Fennec as I write this. I get a dialog to check for new add-ons almost everytime I switch between FF and Minefield and updating builds. I don’t care about my add-ons that much. And its annoying.

“An update to an addon is available”.

Updates should be automatic, seamless and transparent.

If the problem is that the user needs to know when addons have been updated, a gray systembar could scroll down, like on the first-run “these are your rights” screen, informing you that this or that addon has been updated. In fact, the same accounts for the Firefox update, which should also be seamless and transparent, but I imagine that’s a harder challenge.

By: Kyle Huey

Kyle Huey — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 17:22:03 +0000

Something that I think would be almost as useful as this is to remove all of the application modal dialogs. As jmdesp says, especially once FF goes to multiprocess, there really is no reason to have application modal dialogs. Most of the application modal dialogs in FF are “old” anyways in the sense that they deal with things that were designed a long time ago (HTTP Authentication for instance) whereas most of the new stuff seems to use the infobar setup.

By: Ricky Moorhouse

Ricky Moorhouse — Sun, 06 Sep 2009 08:00:20 +0000

Definitely the master password boxes – I always seem to get multiple ones at startup – not sure why!

By: bogas04

bogas04 — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 14:30:11 +0000

I have seen one thing , chrome loads quickly , i mean it is quickest to open , but after loading, it slowly opens its new tab page , and /or the homepage , it is something like what Windows Seven does , it delays all the process for the sake of fast boot up.

I think this ideology should be implemented in firefox 3.6 development too…