1824169 - New desktop notifications are not clearing (problem with outlook.office.com?)

Status: UNCONFIRMED

(Toolkit :: Alerts Service, defect)

Description

[Darren Share]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:109.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/111.0

Steps to reproduce:

Windows 11. Particularly with outloook.office.com (i.e. Microsoft 365 OWA), have new native desktop notifications enabled. Recieve an email.

Actual results:

The notifications do not clear when the email is read/deleted, necessitating them to be manually cleared in the Windows notification area. On other websites (e.g. my personal Roundcube email account), the notifications clear after so many seconds.

Expected results:

The notifications should clear automatically when an email is read/moved/deleted. The notifications on previous versions of Firefox behaved in such a way.

Comment 1

[Darren Share]

I realise this is probably actually something that MS need to fix, but my reasons for filing it here are 1. it's FF that has changed, not Outlook and 2. from previous experience, if I report this to MS they'll probably just say "use Edge".

Comment 2

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

The Bugbug bot thinks this bug should belong to the 'Toolkit::Notifications and Alerts' component, and is moving the bug to that component. Please correct in case you think the bot is wrong.

Comment 3

[Nick Alexander :nalexander [he/him]]

(In reply to Darren Share from comment #1)

I realise this is probably actually something that MS need to fix, but my reasons for filing it here are 1. it's FF that has changed, not Outlook and 2. from previous experience, if I report this to MS they'll probably just say "use Edge".

Thanks for the report! It's entirely possible that there's an edge case in the "delete notification" experience that we've missed. Can you confirm that you're reading/deleting the emails in the same tab that would have displayed the notification? In general, the notifications are all tied to a tab, so different tabs/browsing sessions can't "clean up" after each other.

Comment 4

[Darren Share]

@Nick. Yes, the notifications are originating from the same tab as the one the email is being read in. The tab is pinned, in case that is relevant (as is the Roundcube one where notifications are clearing as expected).

Comment 5

[Darren Share]

Also, I’ve just remembered this off behaviour which is surely connected. If I receive an email while my laptop is off and I read it somewhere else, such as on my phone, I still get a notification for that email when I open Firefox.

Comment 6

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

The severity field is not set for this bug.
:tspurway, could you have a look please?

For more information, please visit auto_nag documentation.

Comment 7

[Darren Share]

Not sure if it's just me, but notifications from OWA aren't working at all today (FF 114.0.2).

Comment 8

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

Redirect a needinfo that is pending on an inactive user to the triage owner.
:nalexander, since the bug has recent activity, could you have a look please?

For more information, please visit BugBot documentation.

Comment 9

[Nick Alexander :nalexander [he/him]]

:krosylight: perhaps you could re-triage?

Comment 10

[Kagami Rosylight [:saschanaz] (they/them)]

As Firefox 111 was the first release with Windows native notificaiton enabled (bug 1497425), I think:

The notifications should clear automatically when an email is read/moved/deleted. The notifications on previous versions of Firefox behaved in such a way.

The previous version had XUL notification which didn't support persistence (the notifications just disappeared no matter what).

To automatically clear the old notifications:

1. The browser should manage the Notification.close() properly (I think this hasn't been the problem)
2. The browser should be able to return the older notifications via swr.getNotifications(), in case Firefox is restarted after the notifications are opened (This should be fixed in Firefox 141, bug 1881043)
3. The website should actually use getNotifications() to see and clear the old notifications.

3 is important, but from devtools I do not see any call to getNotifications(). Therefore I think this is a Microsoft problem that may be affecting Chrome and Edge too.