1545326 - web Push / Toast or Action Center notifications but not both

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Toolkit Graveyard :: Notifications and Alerts, defect, P3)

Description

[Jim]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:67.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/67.0

Steps to reproduce:

ensure that both dom.webnotifications.enabled” & “alerts.useSystemBackend” are set to true in about:config and restart Firefox. Ensure that Firefox shows up in the Windows Notification App list and that notification, banners and action center items are enabled

Go to https://www.bennish.net/web-notifications.html click on authorize and then send.

Actual results:

What happens is that one gets a notification ONLY in the action center

Expected results:

Should one not get a Toast / Web push notification in addition to the Action Center notification as is the case in Google Chrome 67? Having the pop-up ala Toast notification option occurring draws the end user's eye to the notification and is suppose to be disabled by disabling the banner option in Notification center for Firefox.

This happens on Firefox 63 as well as Firefox beta
This happens

Comment 1

[Jim]

The YouTube notifications are again working in Firefox Beta. Yesterday using that test page at https://www.bennish.net/web-notifications.html I would not see the flyout notice aka pop up. I would only see an Action Center item. So I installed the Nightly Firefox same thing. This morning I reverted back to FireFox beta as the default browser in Windows10 1809 x64 and the darn pop up / Toast notifications are showing up in Firefox beta for YouTube notifications. This has happened before with Firefox.

Comment 2

[David Sacal]

Hi,
i've tried to reproduce this on my end on nightly 68.0a01 (4/22/2019) and firefox/chrome behaviour are exactly the same. Please try to reproduce this situation using safe mode (here is a useful link https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/troubleshoot-firefox-issues-using-safe-mode ) or a clean profile(https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profile-manager-create-and-remove-firefox-profiles?redirectlocale=en-US&redirectslug=Managing-profiles#w_starting-the-profile-manager) and reach back to us. @Gijs Would it be correct to categorize this as an enhancement?

Comment 3

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

The priority flag is not set for this bug.
:MattN, could you have a look please?

For more information, please visit auto_nag documentation.

Comment 4

[Jim]

Regarding this bug. If one uses alerts.useSystemBackend the notifications from say YouTube does show up in the Windows 10 Action Center. To this day even with Firefox70 when you click on such a notification tile in the Action Center, all that happens is the tile disappears. The corresponding page say for the YouTube video does not open up. If you go back into the Action Center the clicked on Tile that disappeared is now back again in the Action Center list of notifications.

Chrome has no such issue. When you click on a Tile the URL corresponding to, in this case the YouTube stream opens in Chrome.

Comment 5

[Jim]

Well seems YoTube notifications are a game of wack a mole with browsers. On two separate Windows10 Pro systems, the notifications from YouTube are non-existant in Firefox 73.0.1. They no longer reliably appear and for those which do show up as a banner they WON'T show up in the Windows 10 action center which is what setting “alerts.useSystemBackend” to TRUE is suppose to do. Instead, when one clicks on the banner just as I reported 4 months ago, the banner disappears. There is no way to manually move these Banner notifications over to Action Center by clicking on the --> in the banner's upper right corner.

Comment 6

[Jim]

The result is that unless one is in front of the computer when the pop up banner appears you have no idea there was any sort of notification from a YouTube stream going live etc.

Comment 7

[Jim]

If one uses https://www.bennish.net/web-notifications.html on Firefox 73.0.1 on Windows10 Pro the Toast notification shows up so does the Action Center. HOWEVER if you click off the Action Center and then click back into the action center the notification from FIrefox is nowhere to be seen. This is not the case for Chromium based browsers such as Chrome or Brave. The Action Center notifications created via those browsers and that test page still show up as they should be.

Comment 8

[Jim]

If one sets “alerts.useSystemBackend” to false the notifications never show up in the Windwos10 Action Center. One only sees the banner/Toast type notification

Comment 9

[Lina Butler [:lina]]

We're aware, thank you! 😊 alerts.useSystemBackend = false notifications don't integrate with the action center; they're notifications drawn by Firefox itself. This has many limitations (not matching other browsers and apps, different design, not showing in the action center, as you saw), so there's an experimental backend for showing them.

But, alerts.useSystemBackend = true isn't ready to ship yet, because it has bugs, like the one you saw in comment 7, as well as other bugs blocking the meta bug 1497425. Unfortunately, this feature hasn't been prioritized, and there's no one actively working on notifications now. Because of that, I'm sorry to say that we aren't likely to turn on Windows native notifications with action center integration anytime soon. ☹️

Thanks in advance for your patience!

Comment 10

[Jim]

So does this lack of WIndows Native notifications apply to all builds of Firefox including beta and nightly builds? Just curious if it is an issue only on the release version or not. Due to this issue and another problem with Firefox release, I decided to move to a Chromium based browser after decades of using Firefox as my main browser.

Comment 11

[Lina Butler [:lina]]

(In reply to Jim from comment #10)

So does this lack of WIndows Native notifications apply to all builds of Firefox including beta and nightly builds? Just curious if it is an issue only on the release version or not.

As of 75 (bug 1614274), Windows native notifications are disabled everywhere by default, including Beta and Nightly.

Due to this issue and another problem with Firefox release, I decided to move to a Chromium based browser after decades of using Firefox as my main browser.

Totally understandable. I'm really sorry Firefox has let you down here...but it sounds like the Chromium-based browser gives you a much better notifications experience, and that's important. Hopefully, when we fix the remaining issues and ship native notifications in Firefox by default, we can win you back.

Thanks!

Comment 12

[Nick Rishel [:nrishel]]

The exact details of this report seemed to change over time, but I believe the remaining issue (short of enabling native notifications by default) was resolved by https://phabricator.services.mozilla.com/D151741.

Please reopen the issue if it's still present (when native notifications are enabled in about:config).

Comment 13

[Jim]

I am revisiting this in Firefox stable release.

In Chromium browsers when I get notifications from YouTube the Toast notification remains in the lower right corner of the browser screen until I close the notification.
In Firefox 105.0.3 on Windows 10 I have alerts.useSystemBackend is set to true and dom.webnotifications.enabled is set to true. The behavior is that Toast notifications remain on the stream for approx 6 seconds before the notification is relegated to the Windows10 Action Center. Is there a way to disable this 6 second timer so that these toast notifications stay on the lower right corner of the Firefox screen? I prefer to have the YT notification show up in the lower right corner of the browser and remain there so I see them in case I was away from my desk when they occurred. As it stands now the notifications disappear into the Windows10 Action center which only views on occasion.

P.S. I looked for "notifications" in about:config but could not find one that contained "native"

Comment 14

[Nick Rishel [:nrishel]]

I believe the fix won't be in stable until 106. If you're curious you can check the current beta builds, otherwise it should release in a couple weeks.

Comment 15

[Jim]

I installed the beta and the toast notification popped up in the lower right corner of the screen. I did not interact at all with the toast notification. The notification disappeared on its own and there is no indication that there was any sort of notification on the screen. Nothing in the Windows10 Action center! Is this how this was designed to work??

Comment 16

[Nick Rishel [:nrishel]]

Ack, sorry, I misread your prior message!

I just tested notifications in Chrome using this page and after 6 seconds the notification is sent to the action center. What page is the Chrome notification remaining visible for you? The page might be using the Notification.requireInteraction API which is not currently supported.

Comment 17

[Jim]

I am see that behavoir on Chrome and Brave with that page. Same goes for https://www.bennish.net/web-notifications.html.

However, with Brave Beta YT toast notifications (for a live stream occurring for someone on YT that you have enabled all notifications for ) stay in the lower right corner until the end user either clicks into the body of the notification to open the corresponding URL or clicks on the CLOSE button in the toast notification to dismiss the Toast Notification. I have no idea if this is the case for Google Chrome browser and YT notifications.

In Firefox 106.0b9 it is now taking 20 seconds for the Toast notification to disappear but unlike in the release version of Firefox, there is absolutely no indication that the notification occurred (nothing in the Win10 Action center) should you have been away from the computer in those 20 secs. I tested and confirmed this behaviour using https://www.bennish.net/web-notifications.html as well as with https://bgrins.github.io/devtools-demos/misc/notifications.html .

From this end user point of view all that I have seen happen in Firefox beta is that the period for which Toast notification stays on the screen has been extended from 6 to 20 seconds and there is no longer any reminder in the Windows10 action center.

Comment 18

[Nick Rishel [:nrishel]]

Alright, there's a few things to unroll here but the summary is "everything described is expected".

For Firefox Beta, the 20 second notification is the old, non-native style notifications; you need to set alerts.useSystemBackend = true in Firefox Beta's about:config to get native, action center notifications. The same is true for stable Firefox. If you have alerts.useSystemBackend set to true for Firefox Beta and it's not showing the native notifications then that is a bug and warrants a new bug report.

That said we can ignore Firefox Beta, the reason I suggested checking it was because I misunderstood what your problem was. There's nothing of note in Firefox Beta with respect to the current problems.

I checked Youtube's source code, and as expected the reason notifications don't dismiss on Chromium browsers is because Youtube is using the Notification.requireInteraction API. We don't currently support this API, but I'll probably investigate if it's straightforward to support for native Windows notifications in the near future. You can follow that here.

Comment 19

[Jim]

Thanks for the explaination. Appreciate it,

Does that alerts.useSystemBackend to true reduce the # of seconds that the toast notification remains on the screen in FF? I have also followed that requireinreraction thread as well.

Comment 20

[Nick Rishel [:nrishel]]

Since alerts.useSystemBackend uses system notifications, the duration is set to what Windows sets it to which seems to be about 6 seconds by default. I think you can configure this in Windows.

Comment 21

[Jim]

Regarding this issue. Notifications in Firefox still disappear unlike those push notifications from Chromium based browsers where the notification stay up on the computer screen until the user either clicks in the body of the notification to dismiss it or click on the button in the notification to open the Window in the case of Youtube notifications.

Firefox notifications simply disappear after the specified # of seconds and only show up in the action center where it is easier to miss important notifications.

Comment 22

[Jim]

Push notifications at least those from YouTube in Firefox are a lot less useful. Clicking on the pop up alert does nothing. Clicking on the notification in the action center for a YT live stream does nothing. In Chromium based browser clicking on the popup notification would open up a tab for that YT video.