1415817 - Snackbar support for Android add-ons

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(WebExtensions :: Android, enhancement)

Description

[Jan Henning [:JanH]]

Addons on Android were able to display a short message as a snackbar [1] at the bottom of the screen. Apart from the message text, there were also a few options available - off the top of my head those included at least the display duration of the snackbar (short/long/indefinite) and the ability to show a button with a callback that's executed on click.

[1] For those unfamiliar with that term, this means like the notification that appears when opening/closing a tab, or e.g. https://bug1349155.bmoattachments.org/attachment.cgi?id=8853081

Comment 1

[Jan Henning [:JanH]]

One example use case is the Smarter Scrolling add-on (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/android/addon/smarter-scrolling/), which tracks your scrolling and after a sufficiently large page fling shows a snack bar with a button that allows scrolling all the way to the bottom/top of the page.

Comment 2

[Caitlin Neiman [:caitmuenster]]

Hi Jan, this has been added to the agenda for the WebExtensions APIs triage on April 3, 2018. Would you be able to join us? 

Here’s a quick overview of what to expect at the triage: 

* We normally spend 5 minutes per bug
* The more information in the bug, the better
* The goal of the triage is to give a general thumbs up or thumbs down on a proposal; we won't be going deep into implementation details

Relevant Links: 

* Wiki for the meeting: https://wiki.mozilla.org/WebExtensions/Triage#Next_Meeting
* Meeting agenda: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1H1ZEWf7dmyyu7NZZL90TkbyaUTjbdIK3TUEtO_vff34/edit#
* Vision doc for WebExtensions: https://wiki.mozilla.org/WebExtensions/Vision

Comment 3

[mlissner]

Another use case is notifications. We use them on desktop to notify when our extension does an upload. They're a bit loud, but on desktop they aren't too terrible. On mobile, the notifications really are too much, and being able to do something like this would be a nice improvement since it's a notification that doesn't interfere with the OS-level chrome.

Comment 4

[Mike Conca [:mconca]]

There is general support for this concept, however, the entire mobile ecosystem is changing as the Android platform transitions to geckoView. Until that architectural movement is understood, it would be potentially wasted effort to implement this feature.