Tours, spotlights, and promo balloons removed; quick-start card and Tips & tricks in Help take their place — the entire interruptive discoverability layer (onboarding wizard, nine config-tab guided tours, dashboard feature tour, ~20 one-time promo balloons) is gone, replaced by a short first-run quick-start card and a proper Tips & tricks section in Help.
Onboarding
- new Quick-start card — first run shows a compact three-step card (language & auto dark mode, packed columns & columns per row, open-in-new-tab & weather) followed by a short dismissible checklist (add a bookmark, tag one, open Config → General, see the keyboard cheat sheet). The cheat-sheet checklist row is a button so there is always a way to open it, even when the toolbar's cheat-sheet button is hidden. Progress lives in
settings.quickStartserver-side, notlocalStorage, so it holds across devices (models.go,dashboard-quickstart.js,dashboard-quickstart.css,dashboard/dashboard-promos.js). - new Tips & tricks section in Help — the rotating footer tips (64 entries, one line at a time, five to eight seconds apart) are retired. A new Tips & tricks
.help-blockgroups 30 rewritten tips by task — Everyday, Adding bookmarks, Editing and organising, Finding things, Keeping it healthy, Making it yours — each naming what the key is for, not just the key. Picked up automatically by the Help search filter, quick-links nav, and accordion (config-help-tips.js,config.html,locales/{en,nl,de,fr}.json).
Removed
- fix Config-tab tours — the nine guided tours (General, Bookmarks, Pages, Categories, Tags, Stats, Collections, Finders, Theme) and their ~40 call sites in config.js are removed; the modules are deleted and their stylesheets with them (
config-*-tour.js,config-general-tour.css,feature-tour.css,onboarding.css). - fix Dashboard promo balloons — ~21 one-time "Got it" balloons (search modes, grid navigation, G+jump, smart collections, inline edit, tag cloud, tag-filter bulk toolbar, recent bookmarks, preview, quick-add, week overview, category collapse/rename, quick move/tag/delete, page overview, cheat sheet, weather location) and the promo registry that sequenced them are gone, along with
dashboard-promo-placement.js's anchor-sync for keyboard selection moves. Everything they taught is already in the keyboard cheat sheet, in more detail.dashboard-promo-placement.jsitself stays — it also positions the config settings-search popover and the dashboard quick-move popover (static/js/dashboard-*-promo.js,static/css/dashboard-*-promo.css). - fix Spotlights, layout nudge, and one-time toasts — the paste and preview-card spotlights, the "try modern layout" nudge, the inbox intro modal/toast, and the layout beta/glass toasts are removed.
dashboard-promos.jsdrops from ~335 to ~115 lines now that the skip flags, retry budgets, and abort/reschedule bookkeeping that ordered these against each other have nothing left to order. The device-specific glass→classic layout migration this toast used to run on load moves tolayout-version-utils.js(dashboard-promos.js,layout-version-utils.js). - fix
:tourand:promocommands removed — both pointed at systems that no longer exist (search-commands.js). - fix Settings search promo is the one balloon that stays — its
isGuidedFlowActive()guard collapses to just the What's new modal now that tours and spotlights are gone, and it no longer covers the config tab bar: it is clamped to the search field's top so it can hang below the anchor but never above it (config-settings-search.js,config-settings-search.css). - fix Dead CSS removed — eleven
.button-hintrules across five stylesheets styled the tip strip above the footer buttons that no longer exists; the mobile rule that grouped it with.feature-spotlightis trimmed rather than dropped, since the search-flow hint it also covers is still live (layout-modern.css,layout-side-rail.css,mobile-experience.css,search.css,dashboard.html).
Help
- fix Help text matches what's actually there — Getting started, Configuring, Search & toolbar, Workspace, Tags & collections, Inbox, and Finders no longer send you to buttons that are gone (e.g. "replay from Advanced → System → Tours & onboarding"); Getting started now describes the quick-start card. What's new entries keep their original tour/spotlight mentions since those releases really did ship them (
locales/{en,nl,de,fr}.json). - fix Two missing translations filled in —
helpIntro(Help's opening paragraph) was still English in German and French;customThemesInfoTitlewas still English in Dutch. Found by auditing all four locale files for values that match English when the key sets were already in sync (locales/{de,fr,nl}.json).
Developer & docs
- fix What's new modal — v2026.07.17 JSON added for the removal + quick-start + Tips & tricks arc.
- fix README, MANUAL & Config Help — updated throughout to describe the quick-start card and Tips & tricks instead of the removed tours, spotlights, and promo balloons.
- fix Cache-bust —
whats-new-v164data version (asset_versions.go,whats-new-stub.js) and2026.07-dashboard-release-v122dashboard release token. - fix Leftover config-page dead code from the tour removal — the "Onboarding & tips" advanced section still had a "Reset context tips" button whose feature no longer exists; clicking it cleared two dead
localStoragekeys and showed a false success toast. Removed the button, its handler, its CSS rule, and five now-unused locale keys in all four languages; the section is renamed "Onboarding" (config.html,config-setup.js,config-forms.css,locales/{en,nl,de,fr}.json). - fix Five dead
asset_versions.gofields removed —ConfigBookmarksTourJS,ConfigToursRuntimeJS,PageLayoutSyncJS,ConfigGeneralTourCSS, andConfigButtonsCSSpointed at files deleted with the tour removal;static/js/page-layout-sync.js(186 lines, a leftover from the pre-v2026.07.15 standalone/healthpage) is deleted outright (asset_versions.go). - fix Five dead Go wrapper functions removed —
pingURL,fetchPageTitleSafe,detectRedirectURL,redirectLocationFromResponse, andvalidatePublicHTTPURLwere thincontext.Background()shims around their*Ctxcounterparts that production code no longer called directly; only their own tests did, so the tests now call the*Ctxvariants instead (ping.go,handlers.go,url_safety.go). - fix Playwright suite pruned of tests for already-removed features — 18 tests across 8 files asserted on the config-tab tours, onboarding wizard, dashboard search/G-jump promos, inbox intro modal/toast, layout-version nudge spotlight,
:tipscommand, and:buttons healthtoggle, all deleted in earlier July releases; removed along with their now-unusede2e-helpers.jsonboarding helpers. Two real bugs surfaced in the same pass and were fixed rather than deleted: the side-rail legend test needed to resetonboardingStartedInSessionnow that the quick-start card (not the old wizard) sets it, and the Help tips test targeted a disclosure/accordion structure the Tips & tricks redesign replaced (tests/*.spec.js,tests/e2e-helpers.js).