New Settings, what?
When I just closed Firefox (on OSX), I got this window:
Quite frankly, I am confused. Now I don’t know if this is a Firefox window or one that the OS gave me, but since I upgraded to OSX 10.4.9 earlier today, it is possibly something OSX asked me. Yet, I have a few thoughts on this, if you ask me, unfortunately bad piece of UI.
- May I see your ID please? Who are you, after all? Not only did the window itself not have a title in the title bar, also the menu bar was completely empty. I had no idea whatsoever, what process/entity/program asked me this question. I actually still don’t know. Let alone…
- … why? As a basic rule of thumb, I expect dialog windows to tell me, at least, why they they showed up in the first place. “New settings have been created” is fairly vague. What kind of settings? Who created them? And why do I have to make a decision? But worst of all…
- … what will happen? Now that I don’t know what the decision is even about, I am even worse off since I don’t know the implications of either of the decisions. If I click “new settings”, will you overwrite my Firefox profile? Will I lose data? What will change, compared to how it was before?
Or, if I click “old settings”, (still assuming the window has a reason to show up in the first place:) will that make my Firefox instance unusable/incompatible with some sort of magic and important component?
I clicked “Use new settings”, and, judging by the fact that I can still blog, that doesn’t seem to have been the “wrong” decision. But you never know…
Thoughts?
Update: The fabulous little box is apparently an effect after several subsequent crashes of an application on OSX. There’s an Apple help document about it, thanks for pointing that out in the comments, Michael.
March 14th, 2007 at 12:20 am
Yes, I have some thoughts:
* tell us what version you’re using,
* search LXR (or MXR, I guess) to see if that string exists in our codebase (it doesn’t),
* don’t use terms like “raped”, they’re pretty offensive.
March 14th, 2007 at 1:18 am
Woo. Shiny new Mac OS 10.4.9. Haven’t tried it yet but will do so soon
But not without my backup…
Hope you’ll find out what caused this strange window.
March 14th, 2007 at 2:08 am
Google finds an answer:
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=301084
Apparently you would have clicked an earlier dialog after a crash, telling the OS to try relaunching the app (Firefox) with some default settings instead of your own settings.
I’m on Windows, but if Mac is similar then Firefox doesn’t store many settings with the OS anyway, it uses its own prefs file.
March 14th, 2007 at 4:50 am
I had this window several times under Firefox 1.5 and all MacOSX 10.4.x. Since the upgrade to FF 2.0 I have never seen it again. Don’t know what’s the cause. In any case I clicked “Use original settings”.
March 14th, 2007 at 1:57 pm
I’m starting to wonder if I’d be happier if I could see that dialog. Since going to 10.4.9 this morning, Firefox has been having very odd display issues. Frankly, it’s displaying sites about the way IE 3 used to, and I’m wondering if I need to do something to tell it to allow external CSS…
December 30th, 2007 at 8:44 pm
when did you write this! I have OS 10.4.11