Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.2; WOW64; rv:22.0) Gecko/20130328 Firefox/22.0 http://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/rev/962f5293f87f 1. Start Firefox Metro 2. Swipe in the charm bar and click Settings | Sync | Connect 3. "Connect to sync" menu is displayed with the 3 boxes with "Pair a device" code. Actual result: There is no Copy option - text is not selectable. One can't copy the code to Nightly desktop. Found while testing following story: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=831614

Note that both Firefoxes need to be actively running while pairing occurs. This is not a copy-and-paste operation IMO.

This partially due to our lack of good touch text selection support in chrome content, which is filed under other bugs. Copy pasting between desktop and metro brings up an interesting issue. If the user is over on the desktop long enough, the metro browser process will get suspended. I'm not sure what happens if the 'connecting' browser process is suspended while the user is on the desktop trying to pair, but I imagine it will cause problems. Active network connections may be lost or become unresponsive.

See comment 1: unless both processes are active, pairing won't work. It's a cryptographic handshake.

I'm going to butt in here and save you some time. Fixing this will only encourage users to try to copy and paste the code, and as I mentioned in Comment 1, *it won't work*. Both processes need active event loops and network connections to take part in the pairing process, and that's not guaranteed on Win8. In short: Sync J-PAKE pairing is explicitly not supported between Metro and desktop Firefox. The only supported way to connect the two is dealt with in Bug 831614.

playing devil's advocate... even if you have both open, a user that can't remember a group of 4 digits may want to copy / paste them instead of remembering 4 at a time?

Nothing prevents the user from attempting this at this point so I'm wondering how we should deal with this in the metro ui.

The only time it makes sense to pair two profiles on the same machine is when both browsers are on screen, and thus guaranteed to be running. At that point I don't think it's onerous to make them type. Comment 0 describes a scenario that we cannot support, so it's not work we should do…

(In reply to Richard Newman [:rnewman] from comment #7) > The only time it makes sense to pair two profiles on the same machine is > when both browsers are on screen, and thus guaranteed to be running. I'm fine with not doing this but just wanted to mention that the 2 browsers will not be on the same screen at the same time. One is running full screen in immersive mode and the other is running alongside other apps in the Desktop environment.

(In reply to Brian R. Bondy [:bbondy] from comment #8) > (In reply to Richard Newman [:rnewman] from comment #7) > > The only time it makes sense to pair two profiles on the same machine is > > when both browsers are on screen, and thus guaranteed to be running. > > I'm fine with not doing this but just wanted to mention that the 2 browsers > will not be on the same screen at the same time. One is running full screen > in immersive mode and the other is running alongside other apps in the > Desktop environment. Can we consider the 2 browsers *on screen*, at the same time, if Desktop is in Fill view and Firefox Metro on Snapped view as seen in the screenshot?

(In reply to Virgil Dicu [:virgil] [QA] from comment #9) > Can we consider the 2 browsers *on screen*, at the same time, if Desktop is > in Fill view and Firefox Metro on Snapped view as seen in the screenshot? I had thought about that situation. It doesn't seem like it would be (a) common, (b) detectable, and thus it's not worth addressing. And again, Bug 831614 provides a better solution for connecting Metro with Classic. The pairing dialog exists to allow users to type into a different machine, and for no other purpose.

OK so you found a case where they are both on screen at the same time, but I don't think people will think of doing this in the common case.

Another case by the way is having 2 monitors, which I did think of before but didn't bother saying it because it isn't the most common case.

When both browsers are front facing, you can complete the setup. We don't prevent people from doing this. They'll have to enter the codes manually. We probably still want a bug filed on closing the sync dialog and throwing something up explaining why when the user has the pair window open fullscreen and the window loses activation.