Bugzilla

(In reply to :Gijs (he/him) from comment #13)
> The remaining option I see is showing the dialog once a Firefox window does regain focus/activation. It'll be a bit tricky to implement to ensure we only show the panel in 1 window, and perhaps there needs to be some timeout (it's probably confusing if we show it 2 days later or w/e). But at least then in the common case where the user drops a URL and this results in (almost) no visible change in the window, if they click into the window, they will see what happened.

Yeah I see what you mean. Scheduling the panel to open on window activate makes sense to me, but only if it's activated within a narrow time span like 15 seconds. I suspect if the limit is longer than that, it will come across like a bug. This might be helped by something I suggested in another bug though... I think that was bug 1740705. If we made the indicator animation more dramatic and added a numeric badge that counts downloads, we wouldn't need to worry so much about getting the user's attention by opening the panel.

It seems like this is coming up more frequently because we have a downloads panel instead of a downloads toolbar/pane. So I guess that sort of limits the contexts in which it's appropriate to open the downloads view. So for cases where the window is inactive, or another panel is already open, we could skip opening the panel and rely instead on the intensity of the visual/screen reader feedback. This would also help users who disable `alwaysOpenPanel` because they might not want the panel to interrupt their inputs, but still want a stronger feedback.

Also, if we think it's still worth opening the panel once the window is activated, I think a stronger indicator would help prevent that feeling like a bug. The badge could basically serve as an indicator that the panel is going to open once the window is activated, so users wouldn't be as likely to  be surprised when it does open. And instead of only doing this on drag-and-drop, we could do this in general when a download happens when no Firefox window is active. (not sure how many sources that currently encompasses after the other patches we've made—maybe zero—but it would be good to have a default behavior in case any future sources are added)

(In reply to :Gijs (he/him) from comment #13)
> The remaining option I see is showing the dialog once a Firefox window does regain focus/activation. It'll be a bit tricky to implement to ensure we only show the panel in 1 window, and perhaps there needs to be some timeout (it's probably confusing if we show it 2 days later or w/e). But at least then in the common case where the user drops a URL and this results in (almost) no visible change in the window, if they click into the window, they will see what happened.

Yeah I see what you mean. Scheduling the panel to open on window activate makes sense to me, but only if it's activated within a narrow time span like 15 seconds. I suspect if the limit is longer than that, it will come across like a bug. This might be helped by something I suggested in another bug though... I think that was bug 1740705. If we made the indicator animation more dramatic and added a numeric badge that counts downloads, we wouldn't need to worry so much about getting the user's attention by opening the panel.

It seems like this is coming up more frequently because we have a downloads panel instead of a downloads toolbar/pane. So I guess that sort of limits the contexts in which it's appropriate to open the downloads view. So for cases where the window is inactive, or another panel is already open, we could skip opening the panel and rely instead on the intensity of the visual/screen reader feedback. This would also help users who disable `alwaysOpenPanel` because they might not want the panel to interrupt their inputs, but still want a stronger feedback.

Also, if we think it's still worth opening the panel once the window is activated, I think a stronger indicator would help prevent that feeling like a bug. The badge could basically serve as an indicator that the panel is going to open once the window is activated, so users wouldn't be as likely to  be surprised when it does open. That relationship between the badge and the panel opening on its own would be reinforced by the fact that the indicator attention state is cleared when the panel opens, so this automatic operation would reset the badge. And instead of only doing this on drag-and-drop, we could do this in general when a download happens when no Firefox window is active. (not sure how many sources that currently encompasses after the other patches we've made—maybe zero—but it would be good to have a default behavior in case any future sources are added)