876394 - Popup notification goes unnoticed in unfocused windows

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Toolkit :: General, defect)

Description

[Vladimir Vukicevic [:vlad] [:vladv] (needinfo me, slow to respond)]

If a web app does something that requires a synchronous doorhanger notification (e.g. asking to store more than 50MB in IndexedDB), the doorhanger won't appear until Firefox has focus again.  There is no indication that Firefox is waiting for any kind of user input, so if you happen to be in a different window, you won't notice that you actually need to do anything.. and whatever you're waiting for may just be hung.

(This might not be only with synchronous notifications, but that's the easiest to reproduce.)

STR (in a clean profile -- assuming you have never stored the data from this site before):

1) Go to www.unrealengine.com/html5
2) Click Play
3) Focus another window

After a few minutes, when it finishes downloading, Firefox will appear to just sit there.. but if you click back in the Firefox window, the doorhanger will appear.

Comment 1

[Dão Gottwald [:dao]]

We should probably call window.getAttention?

Comment 2

[Vladimir Vukicevic [:vlad] [:vladv] (needinfo me, slow to respond)]

Yeah, at the very least.. that's probably the easiest way to make this better with no UI impact, though it's not a full solution I don't think.  Is there any reason why we can't call window.getAttention *and* show the doorhanger at the same time, even if the window doesn't have focus?  Though I think the doorhanger goes away if you click outside of it, so maybe that's the reason?

Comment 3

[Dão Gottwald [:dao]]

(In reply to Vladimir Vukicevic [:vlad] [:vladv] from comment #2)
> Is
> there any reason why we can't call window.getAttention *and* show the
> doorhanger at the same time, even if the window doesn't have focus?  Though
> I think the doorhanger goes away if you click outside of it, so maybe that's
> the reason?

Yeah, the popup wouldn't be anchored anywhere and the dismissal behavior would be unclear.

Comment 4

[Vladimir Vukicevic [:vlad] [:vladv] (needinfo me, slow to respond)]

We could/should still anchor it to the URL bar icon.. for dismissal behaviour, would be tricky, but maybe we could do something like not dismissing on a click that the browser gains focus on, and only dismissing if there's a click with the browser focused?  (So one click to focus, and then another click to dismiss)

Comment 5

[:Gavin Sharp [email: [e-mail]]]

I think that would be too complicated to implement, and the idea of a popup appearing for a non-focused window seems weird in general. Seems to me that just calling getAttention in these cases would address this problem adequately.

Comment 6

[Dão Gottwald [:dao]]

Attachment: patch

Comment 7

[Dão Gottwald [:dao]]

https://hg.mozilla.org/integration/mozilla-inbound/rev/6a090a8a7684

Comment 8

[Ryan VanderMeulen [:RyanVM]]

https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/rev/6a090a8a7684