778339 - Clicking anywhere outside of the localStorage prompt dismissed the prompt.

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Firefox :: General, defect)

Description

[rmacasieb]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_8_0) AppleWebKit/536.11 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/20.0.1132.57 Safari/536.11

Steps to reproduce:

I clicked outside of the localStorage prompt ( somewhere else on web "cavnas" ), resized the window, etc.


Actual results:

The "This website is asking to store data on your computer for offline use." prompt disappeared.


Expected results:

The prompt should have stayed visible until the user actually made a choice, or closed the prompt.

Comment 1

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

Over to Firefox, since this is a pure UI decision.  But I believe this prompt is quite purposefully a doorhanger that a user can dismiss simply by clicking anywhere outside the prompt.  The user can also recall it by clicking on the site icon, of course, if he wants to deal with it later.

Comment 2

[Justin Dolske [:Dolske]]

Some more context here: this came via report through stephend, http://pastie.org/4345104

As-filed, this is working as expected. Such "doorhanger" UI is intended for the user to easily dismiss, because users hate getting prompts they have to make decisions for (see: Windows UAC prompt grumbling).

But with context, I think what the reporter is actually wanting to understand is if this prompt is _really_ needed, and if so if there's a better alternative. It's a good example of the kinds of problems a real website runs into with these prompts. I'm not personally familiar with the the reasoning for this storage prompt, though I do note that bug 729320 was recently asking about removing the prompt for IndexDB (at least in some cases).

Is this prompt indeed coming from localStorage? I know there's been some discussion around _not_ recommending people use that due to performance issues anyway.

Also relevant for submitter:

https://hacks.mozilla.org/2012/02/saving-images-and-files-in-localstorage/
https://hacks.mozilla.org/2012/02/storing-images-and-files-in-indexeddb/
http://www.nczonline.net/blog/2012/03/07/in-defense-of-localstorage/

IndexDB may be a better implementation, although I don't think that will resolve the prompting issue.

Comment 3

[rmacasieb]

The reason why it's bad in my case, is that my website deals with pulling in A LOT of photos and videos. We need to access this to make sure we're performant.

That said, we're blocked and in "Loading" UI until the user clicks Allow. If they click outside, or resize the window, or anything else, and that prompt disappears the user is now stuck looking at a loading screen. And honestly, the blue question mark button isn't very obvious. Who clicks that?

Comment 4

[Justin Dolske [:Dolske]]

Just to better understand: what's the driver here? Performance? Offline access? Both? What's the experience in other browsers?

I know it's been raised as a question before that it's not clear what the click-anywhere-to-dismiss behavior of these prompt should be (eg, for geolocation)... We could explicitly cancel any callbacks, but then the user can't really make a decision later. But if there's no notification sent to content, it's left wondering if the user is asleep or what.

Agreed that the current icon isn't very useful. Pretty sure it's just a default, and should probably be reconsidered as more sites make use of such APIs.

Comment 5

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

> Is this prompt indeed coming from localStorage?

I assume you're talking about the third prompt on that page?  The one with screenshot at http://cloud.yummygum.com/image/422s3U0Q0s2h ?

That prompt can come up for two reasons, as far as I can tell.  The first is a call to IndexedDBPromptHelper_observe being called with topic "indexedDB-permissions-prompt".  The second is offlineAppRequested being called.  That happens when the document has an @manifest on the root.

I know we have bugs to remove the prompt in the manifest case, by instead violating the spec like everyone else does and limiting the offline storage and evicting it as needed.

I can't speak to the indexeddb situation, but I bet sicking can.

Comment 6

[Jonas Sicking (:sicking) No longer reading bugmail consistently]

We have already removed the prompt if you try using recent nightlies or the aurora branch. Firefox 16 will ship without a prompt for IndexedDB usage.

You still get a prompt once you reach 50MB of usage. We're working on removing that too, but it's not quite there yet. Hopefully Firefox 17 won't have a prompt at all for simply using IndexedDB.

Comment 7

[BugBot [:suhaib / :marco/ :calixte]]

In the process of migrating remaining bugs to the new severity system, the severity for this bug cannot be automatically determined. Please retriage this bug using the new severity system.

Comment 8

[Mark Banner (:standard8)]

Marking as WFM as comment 6 implies that this was being worked on and improved many years ago.