[7483] in testers
Re: firefox home page override problem
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Robert A Basch)
Thu Jun 22 14:06:26 2006
From: Robert A Basch <rbasch@MIT.EDU>
To: testers@mit.edu
In-Reply-To: <200606212158.k5LLwITj030135@anhedonia.mit.edu>
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Date: Thu, 22 Jun 2006 14:06:12 -0400
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On Wed, 2006-06-21 at 17:58 -0400, Robert A Basch wrote:
> reading of the firefox source, it looks like a special preference
> setting can now be used to prevent this behavior.
Upon further testing, this may not be such a good idea.
When the preference "browser.startup.homepage_override.mstone"
is set to "ignore", firefox will indeed not display the override
URL when the version changes. However, this won't work for
existing profiles, which will already have this value set to
a valid version string.
There are several ways we might deal with this:
1) Set the "mstone" preference value to "ignore", as above, but
lock it, so that the value in the user's profile is ignored.
(I believe this will require some additional logic in the
extension).
2) Do not set the override URL in the extension, so that users
will see the stock page displayed when the version changes:
http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/releases/whatsnew/
(This will probably change when we switch to installing a
Red Hat RPM on Linux, to a Red Hat page).
3) Taking advantage of indirection, remove the property setting
for the override URL, but continue to point at the properties
URI for the preference. This results in there being no value
for the preference, so that firefox will not try to display
the override URL.
4) Come up with our own page to be displayed when the version
changes.
5) Leave it as is, i.e. with web.mit.edu displayed when the
version changes.
I am leaning to doing (3) -- though a bit gross, it is easy,
and the result is consistent with the old behavior on Athena.
Bob
