293077 - Expose window.getAttention to unpriviliged browser applications

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Core :: DOM: Core & HTML, enhancement, P5)

Description

[jdperlow]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.7) Gecko/20050414 Firefox/1.0.3
Build Identifier: 

We need the capability to notify the user of an interesting event in the browser
when the browser application does not have focus. There are three cases in Firefox:

The Firefox window hosting the browser application is not the active window, 
The Firefox window is the active window but the tab hosting the browser
application is not active, 
The Firefox window hosting the browser application is not the active window and
the tab the hosting the browser application is also not active.
In IE, we can call window.focus() to try to give the browser application focus.
This is not ideal because the behavior depends on external factors. In the best
case, when another process has activation, the browser taskbar button will flash
signaling the user than an event is happening in the browser. If the taskbar is
in auto-hide mode, it will cause it to appear. In the worst case, the browser
application will just steal activation from the activate application. This can
happen if there are two browser windows in the same process.

Firefox has a method called getAttention on ChromeWindow. Our understanding is
this will make an action appropriate to the hosting OS to get the user's
attention (flash the taskbar icon on Windows, bounce the dock icon on the Mac,
??? on Linux). We'd like this behavior exposed on the browser window. One
concern is that this could be used for abuse. We need to mitigate that. One
reference point is that unpriviliged browser applications can call
window.alert(), which actually has the same effect, but with worse consequences
(e.g. causes a modal dialog to block execution in all the tabs of the window).

The getAttention method needs to handle all three cases above. For case 1, it
should flash the taskbar on Windows, bounce the dock icon on the Mac, and do
something appropriate on Linux. For case 2, it should highlight the tab in the
Firefox browser to draw the user's attention to the tab. In case 3, it should
perform both actions.



Reproducible: Always

Comment 1

[kcoleman]

I'm working on a new product that will have a lot of usage. It's working well in
IE, in large part because we are effectively able to bring attention to the
window. I'd really like it to work at least as well in Firefox. This is pretty
critical functionality for us, so hope this can make it into 1.1!

Comment 2

[Chris Blore]

Set as requesting blocking-aviary1.1 on behalf of kcoleman. (Please do not
misuse the blocking flags).

Comment 3

[timeless]

and i absolutely need a way to turn this off.

Comment 4

[Darin Fisher]

Yeah, we would definitely want the implementation of something like this to
include a preference to allow users to disable the feature (as we do with other
potentially annoying things that JS may actuate).

Comment 5

[Hixie (not reading bugmail)]

http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/#notifications

Comment 6

[Firefox Bug Husbandry Bot]

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1472046

Move all DOM bugs that haven’t been updated in more than 3 years and has no one currently assigned to P5.

If you have questions, please contact :mdaly.

Comment 7

[Anne (:annevk)]

This needs a web standard first.