1687751 - [Proton] Hide large icons in non-windowed common dialog prompts

Status: VERIFIED FIXED

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

Description

[Daniel Holbert [:dholbert]]

Attachment: screenshot

After bug 1680637, JS alert() dialogs now have an icon at their left side.

On Ubuntu 20.10 at least, the icon that gets used here feels a bit alarming -- see screenshot. It's a bright red sign with an exclamation point, and it feels a bit like a stop sign at first glance.

(This dialog/icon is what gets used e.g. in Google Calendar tabs for event reminders, and it feels a bit overly-severe for that sort of usage.)

EXPECTED RESULTS: Less severe-looking icon, perhaps? Or no icon? (do we need to show an icon?)

Comment 1

[Daniel Holbert [:dholbert]]

Attachment: testcase that just spams an alert()

Comment 2

[Daniel Holbert [:dholbert]]

Attachment: testcase 2 (fake calendar reminder alert, to show how this actually feels in practice on e.g. Google Calendar)

Comment 3

[Daniel Holbert [:dholbert]]

Attachment: screenshot of testcase 2

Comment 4

[Daniel Holbert [:dholbert]]

For comparison, no other browser shows an icon on the alert() dialogs in the testcases here. I tested Safari 14 on Mac, Chrome 89 on Linux, and Edge 87 on Win10, as well as Edge 18 (pre-Chromium). And also current Firefox release (84). None of them show any sort of icon; only Firefox Nightly has the icon.

I'm concerned because the icon adds a feeling of urgency/concern to these dialogs, which may be incongruous with its content (e.g. in the "coffee break" reminder dialog above in testcase 2), and which may not match the intent of the web developer.

Could we reconsider whether we need to have this icon in these alert() dialogs? (Is there a reason we're intentionally going out on our own with adding it?)

Comment 5

[:Gijs (he/him)]

(In reply to Daniel Holbert [:dholbert] from comment #4)

Is there a reason we're intentionally going out on our own with adding it?)

We didn't really "add" it. There's an icon in commonDialog.xhtml by default, and that's what gets used, and is the same thing that is used for window-modal dialogs (e.g. try alert('hi') in the browser (not content) console). It's also there in e.g. the quit warning on macOS (I see a question mark icon there). We're just reusing that, and using standard in-content dialog styles. We've deliberately not made any other styling changes.

It looks like on gnome/gtk, we ask GTK for the icon, so that's why the icon is red and alarming. I don't know why Ubuntu is doing that, but I don't think the right reaction is "remove all the icons everywhere". Perhaps the right choice is to switch to the standard Windows icons instead of trying to do the "right" GTK thing, if the meaning of the icons doesn't translate well. It's probably a question to raise with UX to see about direction under proton.

Either way, styling is not finalized and we are not shipping this in 86 so I don't think we need to urgently make a call here.

Comment 6

[Daniel Holbert [:dholbert]]

Thanks! That helps.

(In reply to :Gijs (he/him) from comment #5)

I don't think the right reaction is "remove all the icons everywhere".

Sure, though that's not what I was suggesting. :) I was only suggesting that we reconsider it for alert(), for the sake of cross-browser consistency, and to avoid introducing emotional flavor to notifications whose content we're not aware of in advance & which could be entirely mundane. (Perhaps we might want to reconsider it for some other categories of website-invoked dialogs; I'm not sure. But this happens to be the one I've encountered & have noticed feeling "off".)

For our own dialogs (whose content we provide), this icon (or a related one) may very well make sense; I have no argument there.

Either way, styling is not finalized and we are not shipping this in 86 so I don't think we need to urgently make a call here.

That's good to know.
--> Canceling needinfo since Gijs clarified the key things I'd been wondering/worried about.

Comment 7

[:Gijs (he/him)]

The spec has come in for this and we're just going to remove these large icons everywhere. We'll instead add smaller icons in the "title" of the dialog where appropriate, see also bug 1693008 . We can use this bug to hide these big icons in proton.

Comment 8

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

The product::component has been changed since the backlog priority was decided, so we're resetting it.
For more information, please visit auto_nag documentation.

Comment 9

[Micah [:mtigley] (she/her)]

Attachment: Bug 1687751 - Hide infoIcon from common dialog. r=Gijs!

Comment 10

[Micah [:mtigley] (she/her)]

This might actually be fixed by the work in Bug 1693277. So once that's resolved let's check on this bug and close if needed and abandon the attached revision.

Comment 11

[Micah [:mtigley] (she/her)]

Resolved when Bug 1693277 lands.

Comment 12

[Rares Doghi, Desktop QA]

This issue is Verified as fixed in our latest 89.0b10 and our latest Nightly Build 90.0a1 (2021-05-11). I did test this on an Ubuntu 20.04 and not a Ubuntu 20.10 I hope they do not have a different behavior, if so please change the flag back.