1878037 - Notifications steal focus and show up in the task bar

Status: VERIFIED FIXED

(Toolkit :: Alerts Service, defect, P3)

Description

[Adrian]

Attachment: Notifications polluting the task bar

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:123.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/123.0

Steps to reproduce:

Receive a notification from any website.

Actual results:

The notification showed a blank entry in my taskbar, and took the focus from whatever was focused before. In fact, incoming notifications from Slack interrupted me writing this text multiple times.

Expected results:

Like before, notifications should not show up in the taskbar, nor be automatically focused.

Comment 1

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

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

Comment 2

[Kagami Rosylight [:saschanaz] (they/them) (OOO until 2024-10-06)]

This sounds a lot like bug 1869796 and seems like it's using XUL. Can you also take a screenshot of what your notification look like e.g. from https://www.bennish.net/web-notifications.html ? And can you check alerts.useSystemBackend in about:config?

Comment 3

[Kagami Rosylight [:saschanaz] (they/them) (OOO until 2024-10-06)]

Actually, I can reproduce this with alerts.useSystemBackend disabled. This should be a regression, I'll check.

Comment 4

[Kagami Rosylight [:saschanaz] (they/them) (OOO until 2024-10-06)]

Oh but still, can you check the value of alerts.useSystemBackend from about:config? XUL shouldn't be used on Windows in the first place.

Comment 5

[Adrian]

Yes, I have alerts.useSystemBackend set to false because there was something I found annoying with the native notifications (I don't remember what it was).

Comment 6

[Kagami Rosylight [:saschanaz] (they/them) (OOO until 2024-10-06)]

(In reply to Adrian from comment #5)

Yes, I have alerts.useSystemBackend set to false because there was something I found annoying with the native notifications (I don't remember what it was).

For now I would recommend turning it back to true and report the pain if you remember it later. But still this is a critical bug as XUL is still used in Thunderbird. Thank you for your report!

Comment 7

[Kagami Rosylight [:saschanaz] (they/them) (OOO until 2024-10-06)]

mozregression points to bug 1870512.

Comment 8

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

:emilio, since you are the author of the regressor, bug 1870512, could you take a look? Also, could you set the severity field?

For more information, please visit BugBot documentation.

Comment 9

[Emilio Cobos Álvarez (:emilio)]

Attachment: Bug 1878037 - Fix some regressions on alert windows. r=saschanaz,#win-reviewers

Comment 10

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

Set release status flags based on info from the regressing bug 1870512

Comment 11

[Emilio Cobos Álvarez (:emilio)]

https://treeherder.mozilla.org/jobs?repo=try&revision=3f734f4b42c87d8056038ad71ac6e05fdc6de254

Comment 12

[Bob Hood [:bhood]]

Emilio, could you please assign Priority/Severity settings to this report when you get a chance?

Comment 13

[Emilio Cobos Álvarez (:emilio)]

S3 seems appropriate since it's disabled-by-default.

Comment 16

[Kagami Rosylight [:saschanaz] (they/them) (OOO until 2024-10-06)]

Thunderbird has this enabled by default, btw. Maybe S2?

Comment 17

[Emilio Cobos Álvarez (:emilio)]

(In reply to Kagami [:saschanaz] (they/them) from comment #16)

Thunderbird has this enabled by default, btw. Maybe S2?

Thunderbird is based off ESR, right?

Comment 18

[Alessandro Castellani [:aleca]]

(In reply to Emilio Cobos Álvarez (:emilio) from comment #17)

(In reply to Kagami [:saschanaz] (they/them) from comment #16)

Thunderbird has this enabled by default, btw. Maybe S2?

Thunderbird is based off ESR, right?

Yes, Thunderbird 115 (ESR) is not affected by it, only Thunderbird beta and daily are affected by this issue.

Comment 19

[Pulsebot]

Pushed by [e-mail]:
https://hg.mozilla.org/integration/autoland/rev/bbdc26094a09
Fix some regressions on alert windows. r=saschanaz,win-reviewers,rkraesig

Comment 20

[Iulian Moraru]

https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/rev/bbdc26094a09

Comment 23

[Ardelean Oana, Desktop Test Engineering [:oardelean]]

Attachment: Screenshot from 2024-02-29 16-41-26.png

Issue is reproducible on Firefox 123.0 on Windows 10.
Verified as fixed on Firefox 124.0b5 and Firefox Nightly 125.0a1 on Windows 10 and macOS 12.
However, this issue is still reproduce on both Firefox 124.0b5 and 125.0a1(with alerts.useSystemBackend set to false) on Ubuntu 22.
Should I file a separate bug for Ubuntu only?
Thank you.

Comment 24

[Emilio Cobos Álvarez (:emilio)]

Is this on wayland or X11? And do you know if that's a regression? In any case, yeah, this bug was about windows.

Comment 25

[Kagami Rosylight [:saschanaz] (they/them) (OOO until 2024-10-06)]

Which means, yes please file a new bug.

Comment 26

[Ardelean Oana, Desktop Test Engineering [:oardelean]]

I filled bug 1882975 for Ubuntu.
Updating flags based on Comment 23.