Error found in settings: ReferenceError: Hints is not defined

Error details

I have next settings in my previous version’s config:

// Hints settings
Hints.characters = "asdfghjkl";
settings.hintAlign = "left";
Hints.charactersUpper = false;

After update to SurfingKeys: 1.0.0 I got “Error found in settings: ReferenceError: Hints is not defined”

SurfingKeys: 1.0.0

Browser: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/86.0.4240.198 Safari/537.36

URL: All the sites.

Context

Please replace this with a description of how you were using SurfingKeys.

[aspiers]

I suggest that a rethink of the update process is needed. Realistically, the vast majority users are not going to check release notes for each upgrade - in fact, they won’t even know that an upgrade happened, because the browser does it automatically. So the chances of us finding https://github.com/brookhong/Surfingkeys/wiki/Migrate-your-settings-from-0.9.74-to-1.0 without being automatically pointed at it are extremely low. That results in most users being caught off-guard by this error, so it is not surprising that there are already multiple duplicate reports of issues relating to this backward-incompatible upgrade (#1576, #1580, and #1574 for a different issue).

Suggested solutions

1. Avoid backwards-incompatible changes where possible.
2. Automate the migration of settings from old format to new format.
3. If 2. is not possible, then gracefully handle those cases with helpful errors which point the user to the migration page, to avoid them having to google for the solution.

Additionally, I suggest making sure that all popup errors from SurfingKeys are clearly labelled as SurfingKeys errors, otherwise it is not at all obvious whether these errors are coming from a browser extension, the browser itself, or the page being visited - and this makes it much harder to figure out the solution.

[brookhong]

Since 1.0.2

• Hints.numericHints = true; was replaced with Hints.setNumeric().
• Hints.characters = "abcd"; was replaced with Hints.setCharacters("abcd").