Comments on: Moving Firefox 3 product help to the web

By: Omnisilver

Omnisilver — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 19:47:56 +0000

Is it possible to make a «help» extension for the users who needs a in-product help ?

By: guanxi

guanxi — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 14:17:10 +0000

Users may not be able to access online Help for many reasons, including some posted above, not necessarily due to connection problems.

How about including a local copy of the online Help — sans rich media — with Firefox. Add links that say ‘Updated information may be available online, click here’. Or, automatically take users to the online page, and fail gracefully to the offline version. You could even update the offline content with Firefox updates, sending the diffs. Those should be small updates.

By: ChrisJF

ChrisJF — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 03:10:20 +0000

I don’t know if anybody considered users with Dial Up connections to the internet. The good thing about having built-in product help is you don’t have to wait ages for a pages to load just to solve a minor problem. Waiting gets really frustrating on dial up. The built-in product help is much faster for users on dial up. I know dial up users are a minority but they are still there.

By: Steuard

Steuard — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 00:09:03 +0000

Never mind, looks like the regression I’m seeing happened well before these changes landed. (And it seemed like such a natural connection, too. Oh well.)

By: Josh

Josh — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 20:06:33 +0000

To concur with Robert’s comment, a lot of computers at my company are specifically disallowed from connecting to the Internet. More precisely, there are a number of disjoint networks in labs, in addition to the regular Internet-connected corporate LAN. There’s still plenty of internal web pages to be viewed in this setup, and help should be available. Microsoft Office has gone a similar route with online help, but still installs with a set of help files (and has a config option to tell it to never try to find the online help).

By: Steuard

Steuard — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 18:33:16 +0000

What I’ve noticed is that after updating to Firefox 3 beta 5 on Mac OS 10.5 (Leopard), any attempt to mouse over the Help menu freezes the browser and requires me to force quit. I haven’t had a chance to file a bug yet (or to search for existing ones); if you could post a bug reference for this change (and possibly for this freeze), I’d love to see it! (Make it a lot easier to narrow down a regression range.)

I’ve tried it with both my usual profile and a clean one: breaks either way. I suspect that the issue has something to do with Leopard’s help-indexing feature: the Leopard help menu always has a search field on top of it.

By: Jason Barnabe

Jason Barnabe — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 16:56:54 +0000

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=335289

By: Sohail Mirza

Sohail Mirza — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 16:15:20 +0000

I’m not certain I understand the justification for tying Firefox help to online resources in the event that a user is offline. Just because a user is offline it doesn’t render the product useless, and we’re talking about product help, right?

Say I’m offline, and working on some local HTML content, or my Gears synchronized Google Reader account. I may still have a need for valid product support.

Also, since I mention Gears, wouldn’t it be possible for Firefox to cache the online help content locally in the event that the user *does* go offline? As I understand it, Firefox 3 features a local data store and new offline features.

By: Robert

Robert — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 16:11:08 +0000

You are forgetting about enterprise users behind a firewall, they use the browser in the intranet, and they have the right to be able to open the help and read information like shortcuts, or the page that has help for IE users, etc. at least there must be a bundle of the documentation that can be installed on an intranet server and the URL must be customizable