Update dialog misleading about what will happen?

[Alexander Limi]

Just saw:
https://developer.mozilla.org/devnews/index.php/2009/08/13/firefox-3-about-to-get-a-major-update/

This stuff is very cool, and addresses a major problem from the past: you
upgrade, and suddenly part of your browser is broken. Massive props to
whoever is behind implementing this, it's a very nice solution to the
problem.

However, I think there's a major problem in this process flow — the dialogs
imply that you will have your add-ons disabled if you upgrade, and this will
be the case for everyone that has add-ons. It doesn't actually check whether
an extension has a 3.5-compatible update before showing the warning — it
just checks your currently installed version, which is very likely to be
marked as not compatible. I'm sure this will scare a lot of people off from
upgrading, since they decide to sit it out until their extensions work.

Is there no way we can query the extension on whether it's compatible with
3.5 *before* showing it in the list as being incompatible? In the example,
the CoolIris plugin is actually compatible with 3.5, but this isn't made
clear to the user until he does an explicit check, and hence the warning
that his extensions would be disabled is actually wrong (although
technically correct).

If my assumptions are wrong, feel free to ignore — but that's how it looks
like from the blog posting.

Happy to help improve this flow once I'm back in the office next week, but
wanted to throw this out there in case someone has time to look at it before
then. :)

--
Alexander Limi · Firefox User Experience · http://limi.net

[Robert Brown]

This has been an annoyance for me. I have no way of knowing which addons,
themes, or plugins will be disabled when I upgrade. Two or three times I
have regretted the upgrade. Sure would be nice to have an idea of what will
work and what will not if one takes the upgrade.

Bob
_____________________________________

[Mike Beltzner]

This is fixed in Firefox 3.5, yes, see:

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=324121

Sadly the patch was too invasive to be back-ported to the 3.0 branch, so some users will end up suffering with this problem. Happily, though, we did fix something (can't remember the bug) such that if an Add-on author issued an update for an Add-on so that it works with 3.0 *and* 3.5, the user should already have received that update and have the new maxVer set in their Add-on database. In other words, they'll already have the compatibility update downloaded and installed.

As the post mentions, some few Add-ons have totally different 3.0 and 3.5 versions (usually those with binary components, like CoolIris) and those users will still see this warning :(

cheers,
mike

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