Tails

#8 Updated by sajolida 2018-05-05 13:49:19

During the user testing of Additional Software beta, P5 (who was looking for Mumble) opened Files and thought that the “Tor Browser” folder was referring to an application and not a folder. Like if the “Tor Browser” folder was where the Tor Browser application was saved.

The other preconfigured folders are all named as types of content (“Videos”, “Music”, etc.) and not as application (“Tor Browser”).

This confirms and helps me understand better what huertanix reported.

#17 Updated by sajolida 2019-01-23 12:23:03

It might still be worth to rename “Tor Browser” into “Tor Downloads” even if we don’t get rid of the “Downloads” folder yet:

• In GNOME Files, Having “Tor Downloads” and “Downloads” might be less confusing than having (currently) “Tor Browser” and “Downloads”.
• When saving from Tor Browser, having “tor-browser”, “Downloads” and “Tor Downloads” will probably be less confusing that having (currently) “tor-browser”, “Downloads”, and “Tor Browser”.

#22 Updated by alant 2019-04-24 22:08:56

sajolida wrote:
> I’m quite afraid of having inconsistent naming between the bookmark and the folder. I bet that for most users the bookmark and the folder itself are “the same thing”, so having even slightly different names might lead them to believe that they are different places. The problem might affect newer users, with empty folders, more than users with some files in there already.
>
Ok.

> Could you elaborate on how harder it would be to rename the actual folder as well?
>
It’s not 2 lines on configuration anymore.

> Is it about handling the renaming of the folder during a migration period or anything else?
>
Yes exactly.

> To handle a migration, I would propose to display a confirmation dialog when starting Tails if a ~/Persistent/Tor Browser folder is present asking to rename it. Something like:
>
> […]

If you think it’s better, the we should do that, but it may take longer.

#25 Updated by sajolida 2019-05-03 11:24:03

@huertanix: While discussing Bug #14649, I came to wonder why shouldn’t we call these folders “Downloads” and “Downloads (persistent)”?

@alant: Was removing the default “Downloads” folder part of your plan? What if we use it to store Tor Browser downloads?

#26 Updated by intrigeri 2019-05-04 06:54:09

> I want the bookmarks and the folders to have the same name, at least within a single Tails installation.

FTR we’ve already discussed this on Bug #15464 (where I already asked whether it was OK to rename only the bookmarks) and we reached the same conclusion. I agree. FWIW, it’s consistent with how GNOME handles localization of the standard XDG directories: e.g. when switching to French locales, GNOME will ask whether “Downloads” should be renamed to “Téléchargements”, and if I accept, both the bookmark and the actual folder will be renamed, maintaining consistency between the folder name and the bookmark. Not to say we should localize these folders just yet :)

> To handle a migration, I would propose to display a confirmation dialog when starting Tails if a ~/Persistent/Tor Browser folder is present asking to rename it.

Renaming a persistent folder in the GNOME session, while it’s already potentially in use, involves some of the same technical challenges as Feature #11529. I bet this would delay implementation and make the current shitty UX be around for longer. So I think we should rename the folder either while activating persistence in the Greeter (in live-persist), or in /usr/local/lib/create-tor-browser-directories that’s run in the background during the login process.

Displaying a confirmation dialog there should be easy in itself, but then we increase complexity of related code forever: we need to support both user choices. I doubt it’s worth the effort. I’d really prefer a unconditional migration, possibly with a notification once logged in to inform the user that the migration happened. This should be rather easy to implement (we already have code for this sort of things).

> If it’s less work than handling the migration as I proposed in Feature #15028#note-21 another option could be to create ~/Persistent/Tor Downloads on all new Persistence and have the bookmarks be “Tor Downloads” and “Tor Downloads (persistent)” and otherwise keep the current bookmarks when the Persistence already has a ~/Persistent/Tor Browser folder.
> But I guess that this would require moving the bookmark-naming logic at runtime and it might not be an option.

All these bookmarks are created at runtime already (/usr/local/lib/create-tor-browser-directories, started by /usr/lib/systemd/user/tails-create-tor-browser-directories.service). They don’t persist.

> huertanix: While discussing Bug #14649, I came to wonder why shouldn’t we call these folders “Downloads” and “Downloads (persistent)”?

I’ve replied on Feature #15463#note-9.

Finally, wrt. naming of the bookmarks (<=> naming of the folders given we want them to be called the same as the bookmarks), beware of the length of the name: on Alan’s screenshots, one can see that “Tor Downloads” fits in the GTK file chooser sidebar, while “Tor Browser Downloads” does not (“Tor Browser …” is displayed so we’re back to square one).

#29 Updated by sajolida 2019-05-08 14:30:02

> Renaming a persistent folder in the GNOME session, while it’s already potentially in use, involves some of the same technical challenges as Feature #11529.

I didn’t think about that! Then forget it.

> So I think we should rename the folder either while activating persistence in the Greeter (in live-persist), or in /usr/local/lib/create-tor-browser-directories that’s run in the background during the login process.

To be more specific, what I’m afraid here is for people who might have
stuff in ~/Persistent/Tor Browser to think that their files disappeared
if we don’t tell them when starting Tails.

Another option might be to:

• Rename the folder unconditionally.

• Create a symlink from Persistent/Downloads to Persistent/Tor Browser
  if a folder was renamed.

• Display a confirmation dialog when starting Tails and such a symlink
  is present.

It could be something like:

Your folder ~/Persistent/Tor Browser has been moved to
~/Persistent/Downloads.

You can use the shortcut in ~/Persistent/Tor Browser to find your files
easily. Once you get used to the new name, you can delete the shortcut.

[Cancel] [Delete Shortcut]

I’m guessing that this would create less complexity for you to manage in
the future while solving my problem. As always, we’ll drop this
migration code whenever it becomes problematic in the future.

>> huertanix: While discussing Bug #14649, I came to wonder why shouldn’t we call these folders “Downloads” and “Downloads (persistent)”?
>
> I’ve replied on Feature #15463#note-9.

I’m all for “Downloads” then :)

> Finally, wrt. naming of the bookmarks (<=> naming of the folders given we want them to be called the same as the bookmarks), beware of the length of the name: on Alan’s screenshots, one can see that “Tor Downloads” fits in the GTK file chooser sidebar, while “Tor Browser Downloads” does not (“Tor Browser …” is displayed so we’re back to square one).

“Downloads” is also the shorter option :)

#31 Updated by huertanix 2019-05-09 03:28:54

sajolida wrote:
> >> huertanix: While discussing Bug #14649, I came to wonder why shouldn’t we call these folders “Downloads” and “Downloads (persistent)”?
> >
> > I’ve replied on Feature #15463#note-9.
>
> I’m all for “Downloads” then :)
>
> > Finally, wrt. naming of the bookmarks (<=> naming of the folders given we want them to be called the same as the bookmarks), beware of the length of the name: on Alan’s screenshots, one can see that “Tor Downloads” fits in the GTK file chooser sidebar, while “Tor Browser Downloads” does not (“Tor Browser …” is displayed so we’re back to square one).
>
> “Downloads” is also the shorter option :)

I’m also leaning towards Downloads, seems simpler and needs no explanation for someone coming into Tails from macOS or Windows. One question: Would the Unsafe Browser save downloads to the same directory and are there any security risks that this introduces that I’m not thinking of?

#32 Updated by sajolida 2019-05-09 11:32:35

> Would the Unsafe Browser save downloads to the same directory and are there any security risks that this introduces that I’m not thinking of?

I think that the Unsafe Browser is running as a different Unix user and
has no access whatsoever to the file system of the amnesia user.

#36 Updated by sajolida 2019-09-04 11:29:11

> * on 4.0~beta1, one sees “Tor Browser …” → it’s getting even harder to tell that this is the persistent directory

Good catch!

The bad news is that “Downloads” is almost as wide as “Tor Browser” and
fixing this ticket won’t change things much regarding the visibility of
the “(persistent)” part.

> @sajolida, what’s your assessment wrt. the severity of this UX regression?

If I remember correctly, when I saw how catastrophic the whole thing was
during usability tests, the “(p…” didn’t really help. I guess that
using “Downloads” instead of “Tor Browser” would have helped much more.

#37 Updated by intrigeri 2019-09-07 12:50:31

Thank you. So I’m not adding this to the list of 4.0 release blocker candidates.