On Sat, 09 Feb 2002 12:12:53 +0100 esteemed Jonas =?ISO-8859-1?Q?J=F8rgensen?= did hold forth thusly: > > That would be a nice solution. > > ...which is exactly what > http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=52821 is about.
See the comment I posted in that bug listing some ways to deal with this problem. I do not expect they will do it though. See how 39057 was closed with WONTFIX and its somewhat analogous. http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=39057 Look at Matthew Thomas' reasoning. I disagree with the reasoning, especially now that we have tabs. The act of closing Moz can take away dozens of loaded pages. It does for how I use Moz. I currently have 30 pages loaded in tabs. At the same time I _rarely_ shut down my browser. Ctrl-Q isn't even something that I ever do. I use the upper right hand corner X button to shut down once Moz has leaded enough memory to make it necessary. Also, I'm closing literally dozens of tab pages in the course of a dayt and and I don't want to use the mouse to do it since I don't want to move my hands away from the keyboard. Having the browser close on me represents a considerable loss. Even if the browser was enhanced to work the way Opera does (Opera remembers all the windows that were open when you shut down and reopens them on start-up) that still doesn't let you restore back pages that may have expired out of existence or whose contents have changed (eg a web log where stuff scrolls off the bottom). So I disagree with his reasoning. See below for that reasoning from 39057: ------- Additional Comment #71 From Matthew Thomas (mpt) 2001-04-22 05:17 ------- I apologize for not getting to this bug sooner. For the third and (hopefully) final time, this bug is invalid. Yes, I know it has a lot of dups. And I know that in Mozilla's current state, there are dataloss problems which an alert could prevent. But an alert is not the right way to fix those problems. Here's why. Alerts are the user interface equivalent of telemarketing calls. It may sound incredible to those who haven't spent a lot of time watching people use computers, but human beings in general are chronically unwilling to pay attention to what alerts have to say. Often they will blindly cancel out of an alert without reading it at all -- especially on Windows, where many alerts are unfortunately given a close box so the user doesn't even have to read the text of the *buttons* (let alone the text of the alert itself). Because they interrupt the user's task, computer users try to banish alerts just as ferociously as experienced Web users try to get rid of popup windows. The more alerts you produce, the less attention users pay to any of them (in your software or in anyone else's), and this causes problems when the computer really *does* need to inform the user of something important. For this reason, alerts should be used as seldom as possible. They should be a method of last resort. Unfortunately, novice UI designers often regard alerts as a method of *first* resort for solving UI problems, especially since they are quite easy to implement. A: `Our users are doing {x} a lot when they don't actually want to.' (In this case, quitting Mozilla.) B: `Hmmmm ... Oh, I know, let's put up an alert asking if they're sure they want to do it.' A: `Uh, but wouldn't that be annoying if you really *did* want to do it?' B: `I suppose so ... I know, let's have a checkbox so people can turn off the alert if they don't need it!' A: `Oh, ok then ... Let's do the alert thing, with a checkbox. And of course we'll need a checkbox in prefs to turn the alert back on again.' MPT: `Oh no, not more prefs! ... <whine> <whine> <whine>' You can see an example of this process in bug 49378. Now, confirmation alerts in particular (which is what we're discussing here) should only be used when the user is at risk of considerable loss -- loss of data, loss of privacy, loss of security, loss of face, whatever. If you try to close an unsaved document in Composer, you're in danger of data loss -- so Composer asks you if you want to save the document. For the same reason, if you close an unsent message, Messenger asks if you want to save it as a draft. For each of those cases, a confirmation alert can and should be used -- but only because there is no better way of solving the problem. But having a general alert, `Are you sure you want to exit Mozilla?', would be (and is, in 4.x for Windows, unless you've dulled yourself to the pain) incredibly annoying. To make things worse, it would work only for a short time -- until you started to instinctively hit the `Enter' key whenever the alert appeared. And this habit would likely spread to other alerts, in Mozilla and elsewhere, even alerts which you actually really should have cancelled out of. That would have the potential to cause just as much dataloss as the alert was intended to prevent in the first place. Here too we have the `checkbox fallacy' -- the idea that a checkbox in the alert, to prevent it from appearing in the future, will solve the problem of some people not wanting the alert. But the problem we are trying to solve is not that only *some* people need the alert *all* of the time; rather, it is that *all* people need the alert only *some* of the time. Even the most experienced user will occasionally press Control+Q instead of Control+W by mistake. For that reason, a checkbox to turn the alert on/off *all* of the time is useless -- just as a similar checkbox was in the `Add Bookmark' dialog, for example (bug 68654). So, if there are problems which result in loss from unexpected exiting of Mozilla, they should be filed as bugs/RFEs for ways of solving the individual problems, rather than plastering the general case with an alert and making the user experience worse every single time they exit. * If accidentally exiting Mozilla, then starting it up again, takes too long, then the dependencies of bug 7251 should be fixed. * As Jesse said on 2000-09-28, people often close browser windows accidentally while entering a form (e.g. a message in a Webmail service). But having an alert on Mozilla exit wouldn't fix that problem, since it's a problem with closing any given window (rather than with closing the whole app). For that, bug 48333 should be fixed. * Since exiting the app from one window closes seemingly unrelated windows, bug 65121 should be fixed (as it has been in Internet Explorer for quite some time). All of these particular problems can be solved by methods which are more pleasant (and as a result, more reliable) than asking the user every time if they're sure they want to exit. Presenting the user with an alert every time would be overkill; it would imply arrogance on the part of the Mozilla application; it would imply stupidity on the part of the user; and it would make every other alert which the user sees (in Mozilla and elsewhere) less effective. For those reasons, I will not allow it.
