1329884 - Handle notifications for simultaneous installs better

Status: NEW

(Toolkit :: Add-ons Manager, defect, P3)

Description

[Andrew Swan [:aswan]]

rhelmer and florian independently pointed out an issue during review for bug 1308295 in which if a second addon installation is started while a previous one is still running, the new progress notification will clobber the original one.  This is actually an existing issue, though bug 1323129 landing may have made it slightly more likely to happen in practice.
In any case, I think the issue is larger than just progress notifications -- we also have the initial xpinstall permission prompt and the final confirmation notification, and for the most part the code that triggers notifications isn't careful about what should happen if there are multiple simultaneous installations taking place.
I'm not even sure what the ideal behavior is, this bug is to think that through and consider improving the current implementation.

Comment 1

[Andrew Swan [:aswan]]

This bug was originally filed about the existing progress notifications.  We have a related issue with webextensions permissions dialogs -- multiple simultaneous installs or upgrades (e.g., clicking "Check for Updates" in about:addons and having that trigger permissions prompts for multiple extensions) aren't currently handled.
I'd like to expand this bug to cover that case too, I'll see how feasible it is to handle everything at once and if not, will split this up into multiple bugs.

Comment 2

[Andrew Swan [:aswan]]

Per conversation with andym yesterday, this is infrequent and when it does occur, recovery is possible, so removing it from the list of blockers for enabling permissions.

Comment 3

[:shell escalante]

Hi UX team!

This is a question around the door hanger flow: if there are multiple installs happening at the same time - what should happen?

Comment 4

[Markus Jaritz [:markus] (UX)]

Multiple installs shouldn't happen at the same time. They should happen in sequence. 
This is part of why - for the next iteration of the install flow - we propose a modal dialog for the permissions and to handle download only after the user confirming permissions. (This way users can not self-triggler parallel installs as the modal block the tab.)
This still leaves multiple automatically triggered update dialogs - those should too be displayed in sequence.

(It looks like we already limit sequence for WebExtensions currently... if I quickly trigger 2 WebExtensions to install, only the second one will go through. (e.g. Ghostery and Disconnect from https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/collections/mozilla/privacy/) - which keeps it simple)

Comment 8

[Andrew Swan [:aswan]]

Over in bug 1442350, :jkt points out that a plausible way to encounter this is if you have background extension update checks disabled, then you do a manual check and 2 or more installed extensions have updates that require new permissions...

Comment 12

[BugBot [:suhaib / :marco/ :calixte]]

The severity field for this bug is relatively low, S3. However, the bug has 6 duplicates.
:robwu, could you consider increasing the bug severity?

For more information, please visit auto_nag documentation.

Comment 13

[BugBot (nomail) [:suhaib / :marco/ :calixte]]

The last needinfo from me was triggered in error by recent activity on the bug. I'm clearing the needinfo since this is a very old bug and I don't know if it's still relevant.