1369295 - Tab Queue UX Redesign to use Native Notifications

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 1205597

(Firefox for Android Graveyard :: Settings and Preferences, defect)

Description

[Tyler]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_10_5) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/58.0.3029.110 Safari/537.36

Steps to reproduce:

I love the Tab Queue idea! It's one of the main reasons I use Firefox (version 53.0.2).

However, I almost didn't enable it because the setup process was so laborious and rather scary. 





Actual results:

Giving permission to draw over apps, and the prompt that leads up to that, were a bit confusing. I don't imagine a less savvy user understanding or trusting it.


Expected results:

I propose simplifying the UI to get rid of the prompt and drawing over screen permission altogether, by utilizing Android's native heads-up notifications. 

Proposed flow:

1. "Open link in browser" from another app.
2. Firefox posts an Android notification, set to high priority to trigger the "heads-up" style so that the notification pops down from the top of the screen for a few seconds. This would replace the current toast/snackbar-style overlay that requires the draw over screen permission.
3. The user can click on the notification, while it's peeking out, to open the tab immediately. 
4. If they don't, the notification gets set to low priority after a minute, sending it to the bottom of the notification stack, out of the way of more important messages/reminders/etc, but still there in your history waiting for you to use it if you like.
5. Once the user opens Firefox to that tab, Firefox clears the notification.

If the user opens more than one tab before clicking or clearing the notification, Firefox will group them into a single InboxStyle list notification which can be expanded by the user if they want. Similar to the "Clip Stack" app: an easily-accessible history that stays out of the way ( https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.catchingnow.tinyclipboardmanager&hl=en )

This method would not only shorten the funnel to enabling Tab Queue and increase its adoption, but it would also solve these other bugs:

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1298767
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1271306
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1170135
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1177755
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1177423

Comment 1

[Jan Henning [:JanH]]

Sounds potentially nice, albeit with the caveat that "heads-up" notifications were introduced only in Android 5 (API21) I think, so for the time being we still need our custom notification implementation for older Android versions.

Comment 2

[Paul [pwd]]

There was an old bug for this though I can't find it. I was just coming here to plead for its reconsideration. Alas, I think the tab queue should definitely be moved to heads up notifications. It's less expensive in terms of code, it's less intrusive and doesn't require scary permissions wise which is thus a lot more user friendly and yes, while there are concerns about pre Android 5.0, there has to be a limit to how much you can hold back an app for legacy users surely?

Also by switching to HUNs, you're able to leverage the notifications to feature more options like "close/dismiss" and "open in private browsing mode".

Comment 3

[Tyler]

Oooh I like those extra actions, Paul. We might need a shorter phrase to use for "open in private browsing mode" that would fit on an Action button. What could it be?

I'd love to start working on this. I could preserve the old method for pre-Lollipop users...

Comment 4

[Paul [pwd]]

(In reply to Tyler from comment #3)
> Oooh I like those extra actions, Paul. We might need a shorter phrase to use
> for "open in private browsing mode" that would fit on an Action button. What
> could it be?
> 
> I'd love to start working on this. I could preserve the old method for
> pre-Lollipop users...

It could just say "Private" or show the Private Browsing (Mask) icon. I'll NI Sebastian who would be able to tell you if they'd accept a patch for this.

Comment 5

[Sebastian Kaspari (:sebastian; :pocmo)]

* Heads-up notifications: We experimented with them - but it's not something that is available via an API. The system decides if a notification is important enough to show as a heads-up notification (Often this just means it's a notification with sound + vibration). We could try to hack it in (by playing a not audible ringtone) - but this is fragile. So we didn't do that.

* Overlay setting: Yeah, that's super complicated and scary. The reason for that is that this API we are using for overlays wasn't really intended for being used by apps. Android O introduces a new API for overlays and with that we might have the opportunity to make it better.

* Overall with the move to custom tabs I'm not sure how a new iteration of tab queue should look like: Most apps now send a custom tab intent and expect the website to open in a customized UI. Just queuing them as regular URLs might not be what is expected.

Comment 6

[Paul [pwd]]

I'm not sure if something has changed since the original efforts of two years ago, but presently in Android, it's just a matter of setting the priority high enough to make the notification a Heads Up Notification. Setting a notification priority isn't a huge deal.