1787980 - The update notification dot below the Firefox View tab (for new/different tabs to pick up) is distracting

Status: VERIFIED FIXED

(Firefox :: Firefox View, enhancement, P2)

Description

[Paul Bone [:pbone]]

The new tab pickup tab has a green triangle below it some of the time. I appriciate that this means something has changed on that tab. but that's not important/relevant to my workflow. It's not like a new e-mail or something I may need to know, it's distracting.

Comment 1

[Francesco Lodolo [:flod]]

I assume this refers to the "tab has updates" graphic in the tab strip?

Comment 2

[Josh Berman]

Hey there,

I think this should be relogged as an enhancement request to improve how we display page updates in the UI. There's no defect here as it's currently displaying as spec'd (though I understand the concern / appreciate the feedback).

Cheers.

Comment 3

[:Gijs (he/him)]

(In reply to Josh Berman from comment #2)

Hey there,

I think this should be relogged as an enhancement request to improve how we display page updates in the UI. There's no defect here as it's currently displaying as spec'd (though I understand the concern / appreciate the feedback).

Cheers.

Changed to an enhancement here (can't seem to see an enhancement type in jira?) and moved to the follow-up jira epic. We shouldn't need a separate duplicate filed.

Comment 4

[Daniel Holbert [:dholbert]]

[Not trying bikeshed the enhancement vs. defect classification, just adding an additional voice as a user who's trying to heavily dogfood Firefox View]:

This feels very much like a bug/defect to me as a user, or at least an annoying papercut. IMO we should address this before shipping if possible; not as a followup. (I ran across this bug report because I nearly filed a dupe bug just now.)

I've run into this UI (for me it's a blue dot beneath the Firefox icon) appear from time to time, and then I click into Firefox View to see what it's there for, and I see.... nothing particularly notable/notification-worthy.

When I click & don't see anything particularly different/noteworthy, it leaves me-as-a-user with the impression that either:
(1) maybe something's broken (e.g. we're spamming that status by accident for no reason)
(2) maybe there really was an update/alert/message of some kind, and I somehow dismissed it.
(3) [after experiencing this a few times and getting frustrated about clicking to dismiss it each time and not finding anything new/notable ever]: maybe Firefox is being kinda spammy and trying too hard to draw my attention to this new UI feature.

None of these impressions leave a particularly good flavor in my mouth. I trust the folks working on this & am sure it's not actually any of these, but IMO we're leaving users with these or similar impressions by posting this dot frequently without any obvious/notable change behind it.

Comment 5

[Daniel Holbert [:dholbert]]

STR to trigger this issue on demand (using a laptop and a phone in my case):
(1) Have Firefox open on laptop.
(2) On your phone (or a different Firefox instance), switch tabs in Firefox. Or open a new tab and go to some URL.
(3) Trigger a sync from your phone (the device from step 2)
(4) Trigger a sync on your laptop (the original device from step 1)

(Note: in real-world user experience of this bug, steps 3 and 4 are unnecessary; the syncs just happen eventually/automatically in the background, of course.)

ACTUAL RESULTS:
After step 4, a notification dot appears on my laptop's Firefox View favicon.
I'm pretty sure this is to let me know that my "Last Active" tab-tile there has been updated, but it's not at all obvious that anything has actually changed (nothing is highlighted as "new" like e.g. a bolded new-email would be on Gmail, or a modal message-popup on Facebook). So this ends up feeling confusing when you run up against this in the real world. (It's a bit clearer what's going on when you intentionally follow these STR.)

EXPECTED RESULTS:
Either we shouldn't be bothering to set this status (do we really need to alert users that they need to click over to see their updated last-active tab tile?); or if we really do want to set this status, we should be making it clearer what the relevant update is (e.g. adding some additional highlight to the last-active-tab tile to indicate "hey thanks for clicking over; here is the specific update that prompted me to get your attention"

Given how easy it is to trigger this issue with these STR (basically just "use Firefox on two devices"), it feels like any multi-device user will end up hitting this frequently/repeatedly, FWIW.

Comment 6

[:Gijs (he/him)]

(In reply to Daniel Holbert [:dholbert] from comment #5)

I'm pretty sure this is to let me know that my "Last Active" tab-tile there has been updated,

Correct.

but it's not at all obvious that anything has actually changed (nothing is highlighted as "new" like e.g. a bolded new-email would be on Gmail, or a modal message-popup on Facebook). So this ends up feeling confusing when you run up against this in the real world. (It's a bit clearer what's going on when you intentionally follow these STR.)

You don't feel that the tab being marked "last active" with a big green badge counts as highlighting? :-)

Comment 7

[Daniel Holbert [:dholbert]]

(In reply to :Gijs (he/him) from comment #6)

You don't feel that the tab being marked "last active" with a big green badge counts as highlighting? :-)

No, because it always looks like that. (It doesn't get any special styling when it gets updated, to indicate that it is new/different, as compared to e.g. Gmail new message or Matrix/ Slack which add some styling at the moment that a notification-worthy update happens so you know why you were notified)

Put another way: Firefox View looks stylistically identical when it has notified me vs. when it hasn't, so it's not visually clear what the reason was for the notification. I don't remember what the previous "last active" tab was, so I may not notice that there's anything new there.

Comment 8

[Shane Hughes [:aminomancer]]

For my uses, synced tabs change so frequently and consistently it's kind of business as usual. And having new synced tabs doesn't require any action from me. Normally when you're automatically subscribed to "notifications" for something, it's some event that demands action. But just making new resources available to the user to use at their leisure seems more like RSS or youtube subscriptions, something you'd expect the app to request your permission for.

Actually, this might be a good thing to handle with messaging. It could be reasonable to just show a permission prompt after the tabs setup flow, asking if you want the icon to show when tabs are synced. Idk what a good string for that might be, though, since it's just a little attention dot. Calling it a "notification" would probably make users expect a toast/push style notification. It seems like such a small thing to ask for permission for, but it caused me to click the Fx View button several times and be confused about what my attention is needed for, until I went into the source code to find out what it means.

Comment 9

[Simon Friedberger (:simonf)]

As far as I understand anything that changes there is directly caused by user action like viewing something on a different device so I don't quite understand why it would require notification at all.

Comment 10

[Ray Fambro]

Thanks for the feedback on this. Let's go ahead and remove the notification dot for now. We'll work internally on an improved experience in the future.

Comment 11

[:Gijs (he/him)]

Attachment: Bug 1787980 - add a pref for the firefox view tab notification dot and disable it by default, r?niklas

I opted to add a pref and effectively disable things by default rather than
just removing everything, because it seems likely we'll want to re-introduce
this in some form at some point soon, plus this is a much smaller change to
uplift and keeps the test coverage for now, too.

Comment 12

[Ray Fambro]

Great alternative Gijs. Thanks!

Comment 13

[Pulsebot]

Pushed by [e-mail]:
https://hg.mozilla.org/integration/autoland/rev/1151484a7c8a
add a pref for the firefox view tab notification dot and disable it by default, r=niklas

Comment 14

[Cristian Tuns]

https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/rev/1151484a7c8a

Comment 15

[Sam Foster [:sfoster] (he/him)]

Comment on attachment 9299248 [details]
Bug 1787980 - add a pref for the firefox view tab notification dot and disable it by default, r?niklas

Beta/Release Uplift Approval Request

• User impact if declined: The activity dot shows on the firefox view button with any new tab sync activity - which has been reported as distracting
• Is this code covered by automated tests?: Yes
• Has the fix been verified in Nightly?: No
• Needs manual test from QE?: No
• If yes, steps to reproduce:
• List of other uplifts needed: None
• Risk to taking this patch: Low
• Why is the change risky/not risky? (and alternatives if risky): Adds a new pref and makes the notification dot conditional on that pref. The change only affects firefox view.
• String changes made/needed: None
• Is Android affected?: No

Comment 16

[Donal Meehan [:dmeehan]]

Comment on attachment 9299248 [details]
Bug 1787980 - add a pref for the firefox view tab notification dot and disable it by default, r?niklas

Approved for 107.0b4.

Comment 17

[Donal Meehan [:dmeehan]]

https://hg.mozilla.org/releases/mozilla-beta/rev/aa1a407db734

Comment 18

[Ray Fambro]

Thanks team!

Comment 19

[Gabi Cheta [:Gabi] Desktop QA]

Verified as fixed with Firefox 107.0b4 and Firefox 108.oa1 Windows 10x64, macOS 10.12.6 and Ubuntu 18.4.