On 19/01/2015 13:58, Henri Sivonen wrote:
I think this leads to a more general question: Is it really a good idea that our profile migrators migrate settings from other browsers when those settings have been left to the defaults of those browsers?
Note that we don't migrate IE prefs if they have not been changed (when we can detect that), and we don't migrate the homepage if it's the system default one as well (provided the registry information didn't change recently).
The only prefs that are migrated regardless (cause there's no way to check if they are at the default value afaik) is Safaris'.
I think most of the prefs we are migrating are somehow related to the user browsing habits (load tabs in background, smoothscroll, underline anchors, spell check and so on...). When we converted the migrators from cpp to js, we filterd most of the prefs out, exactly to avoid creating an unacceptable downgrade of the Firefox experience (for example we don't migrate anymore the location bar prefs cause the awesomebar _is_ better!)
We could probably do better and remove some more prefs (formfill, block images and cookie behavior for example), but we didn't ignore the problem.
Font prefs for example could be important to some users, for locale or visual issues, not migrating them in those cases could create more issues to the user than migrating a system font setting that is optimized to work on that system (so it's unlikely to be problematic).
Keeping track of the system defaults could be expensive, someone should periodically check the default values and keep the code up-to-date. Considered I'm not even sure how often we run manual browser migration tests, that doesn't seem like something achievable.
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