Firefox/Features/Personas Rotator

Status

Team

Open issues/risks

• Does the mobile team want to do something similar for Fennec?
• Do we want to sync this behaviour as part of prefs? Does the Sync team have to do anything here?

Stage 1: Definition

1. Feature overview

Goal: Create a simple way for users to automatically rotate between the Personas they have installed on their browser.

One of the most popular features of the Personas Plus add-on is the ability to automatically rotate between favourited Personas. Since we want to end-of-life the add-on, we want to emulate a simplified version of this behaviour in Firefox itself.

Rather than emulating the current overly-complicated behaviour, however, I think we could simply add a checkbox to the Personas page of the Add-ons Manager that, when checked, has Firefox rotate between installed Personas. If the box is unchecked, there is no rotation.

The Personas Plus extension also adds an "extensions.personas.rotationInterval" value to about:config, where a user can change the rotation frequency. The default is 3600 seconds. We would have to add a similar way for users to change the rotation frequency -- I think an about:config value would be sufficient, but would like UX to make that call.

Personas, when rotation is enabled, also automatically select a new Persona when the browser is restarted.

2. Users & use cases

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3. Dependencies

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4. Requirements

• Add a checkbox or other similarly simple UI somewhere in Firefox that allows users to have Firefox automatically rotate randomly between their installed Personas.
• Add an about:config value or other UI that allows users to change how often their Personas are rotated.
• If Personas rotation is enabled, the displayed Persona will change when the browser is started or restarted.
• Increase the maximum number of Personas that can be installed, or give users an easy way to increase it themselves (easier than about:config).

Non-goals

We will not be emulating the current behaviour of the Personas Plus add-on, as it is overly complicated, requires the user be logged in to the GetPersonas site, and requires Firefox to contact the server sporadically. This is a much simplified version of the rotator.

Stage 2: Design

5. Functional specification

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6. User experience design

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Stage 3: Planning

7. Implementation plan

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8. Reviews

Security review

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Privacy review

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Localization review

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Accessibility

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Quality Assurance review

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Operations review

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Stage 4: Development

9. Implementation

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Stage 5: Release

10. Landing criteria

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Feature details

Team status notes