391674 - Allow hiding (not showing) number of emails unread in dock icon in Mac OS X

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Thunderbird :: Preferences, enhancement)

Description

[Gary S. Weaver]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X; en-US; rv:1.8.1.6) Gecko/20070725 Firefox/2.0.0.6
Build Identifier: version 2.0.0.6 (20070728)

I (like probably many others) are easily distracted, and having the number of emails show up in the thunderbird icon in the OS X dock is really distracting. It would be wonderful if it were an option to turn this off in Thunderbird preferences.

For now, the workaround is to quit Thunderbird while I'm not interested in seeing this number in the icon in the dock.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
Get a new email.
Actual Results:  
You see a number appear in the icon in the dock.

Expected Results:  
Would like preference to stop the number from showing up in the dock icon.

Thanks in advance!!!

Comment 1

[Magnus Melin [:mkmelin]]

Couldn't find a dupe, marking new.

Comment 2

[Gary Kwong [:gkw] [:nth10sd] (NOT official MoCo now)]

Bryan, thoughts?

Comment 3

[Bryan Clark (DevTools PM) [:clarkbw]]

Interesting idea, I wonder if this has as much to do with our poor biff notification system as anything else.  How do other mac applications handle this?

Comment 4

[Javi Rueda :javirid]

Badge on icons for OS X are enabled/disabled on the notification section of System Preferences.

I am very new on Mac, so a first research on this sends me to check if Apple Mail allows users to let assign "None" to which folder's new messages count should be shown on the Dock icon. It seems that a previous version of Mail allowed it. But not newest one.

Just tested on Daily and unchecking corresponding option on the Notifications section hides the red bubble.

Once this has been said, I don't think a new preference should be added.

Could you try this path please, Gary? If so, it will be fine to post here if it worked and solved the problem.

Comment 6

[Javi Rueda :javirid]

"Enhancement" was explicitly shown at the Importance field, which greys out background of row on Bug List.

Comment 7

[Jonathan Ganc]

(My comment is a continuation from the discussion at bug 920413).

I got my original computer back and, unfortunately, Firefox is in the Notification Center but not Thunderbird. 

For your info, my user agent:
Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.9; rv:31.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/31.0

In principle, I could try removing all my Thunderbird settings and running Thunderbird again but I have a decent number of RSS feeds set up with Message Filters and I really don't want to have set them up again.

Comment 9

[Justin]

I (do not) did not see Thunderbird in Notification center either.  On a hunch, I enabled "When new messages arrive" / { Show an alert, Animate the app icon when a new message arrives }.  A new message arrived, I received a notification, then Thunderbird "magically" appeared in Notification center.  I was then able to go to SysPref/Notifications/Thunderbird and turned off "Badge app icon".

My guess would be: If you don't see Thunderbird in Notification Center, try enabling Thunderbird/Prefs/General/Show an alert, receive an email (see the alert), then check Notification Center again.  You can turn off "Show an alert"; Thunderbird will remain in Notification Center.

Bug: Thunderbird does not appear in Notification Center (under some conditions).

In any case, I would vote for changing the badge app icon preferences to be { Unread messages, New messages, None }.

Comment 10

[Jonathan Ganc]

Hi.

Justin's suggestion did work! After sending a message, Thunderbird showed up in the Notification center and I was able to disable the badge.

Comment 12

[Sum Yung Guy]

Hi, just reporting that I encountered this bug today. I recently upgraded my computer to OS x 10.10, and my Thunderbird to 31.2 - not sure which was the cause. I started getting the badge on the dock icon, and couldn't find any way to disable it, since Thunderbird was not in the list of applications in the Notifications System Preference.

The "Badge app icon with" preference in Thunderbird was frustrating, since there's no option to turn badging off completely. Along with the Thunderbird options for "Show an alert" and "Play a sound", which duplicate the options in the system Notifications settings, it seems to suggest that the alerts are native to Thunderbird, i.e. not using system Notifications - which then seems to be confirmed by its being missing from the Notifications system preferences pane.

My suggestion would be to remove the "Show an alert" and "Play a sound" UI from Thunderbird on OS X with Notification Center. Have Thunderbird always send an alert, but never play a sound natively. Then allow the user to interact with the system UI to control their preferences.

That would also solve bug 981769. The drawback is that you wouldn't have the option to play a custom sound file. However, since that's the way every other app works, it's maybe not a problem. Alternatively, you could have a checkbox for "Play the following sound file", with a note to turn off sounds in the Notifications system preference.

In any case, you should almost certainly remove the "Show an alert" checkbox and set it to always true on OS X 10.8+, since it serves no purpose and causes this bug.

Comment 13

[Javi Rueda :javirid]

(In reply to Sum Yung Guy from comment #12)
> Hi, just reporting that I encountered this bug today. I recently upgraded my
> computer to OS x 10.10, and my Thunderbird to 31.2 - not sure which was the
> cause. I started getting the badge on the dock icon, and couldn't find any
> way to disable it, since Thunderbird was not in the list of applications in
> the Notifications System Preference.

Thunderbird appears on the Notification Center settings after the first notification is shown. As far as I know that is the way apps on OS X should "register" on that dialog box.

> The "Badge app icon with" preference in Thunderbird was frustrating, since
> there's no option to turn badging off completely. Along with the Thunderbird
> options for "Show an alert" and "Play a sound", which duplicate the options
> in the system Notifications settings, it seems to suggest that the alerts
> are native to Thunderbird, i.e. not using system Notifications - which then
> seems to be confirmed by its being missing from the Notifications system
> preferences pane.

There is some confusion on this. See below.

> My suggestion would be to remove the "Show an alert" and "Play a sound" UI
> from Thunderbird on OS X with Notification Center. Have Thunderbird always
> send an alert, but never play a sound natively. Then allow the user to
> interact with the system UI to control their preferences.

It was tried to do some interaction with the Notification settings API, however, it wasn't possible to detect if Badge are enabled on the Notification Settings. About the Alert, keep reading this comment.

> That would also solve bug 981769. The drawback is that you wouldn't have the
> option to play a custom sound file. However, since that's the way every
> other app works, it's maybe not a problem. Alternatively, you could have a
> checkbox for "Play the following sound file", with a note to turn off sounds
> in the Notifications system preference.

We are enabling user to use a custom sound for alerts. That is a differentiation point with other apps. As I said. we are unable to detect if badging is enabled on the Notification settings.

> In any case, you should almost certainly remove the "Show an alert" checkbox
> and set it to always true on OS X 10.8+, since it serves no purpose and
> causes this bug.

This bug is about the number shown over the icon on the dock (also known as "the badge"). Alerts are the notifications, the ones which show who the senders are. The "alert" pops up and then fades away, but then its content could be seen on the Notification Center on OS X. Other operating systems provide other ways: Windows, for example, shows an icon on the task bar.

Comment 14

[Sum Yung Guy]

Javi, thanks for your reply. I've been a regular user of Netscape/Thunderbird on the Mac for twenty years now, and I'm very happy to see that there are still people like you supporting it! 

I do understand that this bug is about the app icon badge, which is not the same as alerts. But if you'll bear with me, I'll try to explain why I think the best solution is to change the alerts behaviour.

(In reply to Javi Rueda from comment #13)
> (In reply to Sum Yung Guy from comment #12)
> Thunderbird appears on the Notification Center settings after the first
> notification is shown. As far as I know that is the way apps on OS X should
> "register" on that dialog box.

After doing an OS upgrade, Thunderbird started showing a badge on the dock icon, although I had previously disabled that. Thunderbird was no longer in my Notifications preference pane list. Presumably the OS upgrade cleared the list. The same thing would happen when migrating an existing Thunderbird profile to a new machine for example.

It seems that updating the app icon badge doesn't cause the app to "register" in the Notifications list. It requires an actual alert notification event sent to the OS. That was my experience anyway. This might be considered a bug in OS X. The result is that if the user has previously unchecked the "Show an alert" box in Thunderbird's preferences, Thunderbird will *never* show up in the Notifications list. Therefore even experienced users can't understand how to remove the badge. That's the reason this bug (actually bug 920413 ) was filed.

One solution might be Justin's suggestion in comment 9, to add a third option in Thunderbird's "App Icon Options" dialog, to prevent Thunderbird from badging the icon. However, I don't think that's a good solution. Mac users expect to control whether icon badges are displayed or not via the system's Notifications preferences. It would be confusing, for example, if someone enabled icon badges in Notifications, but they still didn't display because they were disabled in Thunderbird's App Icon Options. There should not be two different - and possibly conflicting - places to enable/disable badges. The correct place is in the Notifications prefpane. In order for that to be possible though, I think Thunderbird must send at least one "alert" notification event.

Another solution could be to try to explain to everyone the workaround also given in comment 9, manually checking the "Show an alert" box in Thunderbird and waiting for a new e-mail. But unless people are motivated enough to search Bugzilla, they won't find it. It's also counter-intuitive, since we're actually trying to get rid of a notification (badge and sound).

A better solution would be for Thunderbird to automatically check the box (i.e. set mail.biff.show_alert true), and hide the checkbox, when it's running on a Mac with Notifications (OS X 10.8 or later). This would ensure that Thunderbird gets registered in the Notifications pane list, and allow the user to disable the badges and alerts in the standard way.

On a system with Notifications, Thunderbird's "Show an alert" checkbox provides no useful functionality. Worse, it causes confusion by possibly overriding the users' desired settings (or ability to make such settings) in the Notifications pane. As above, there should not be two conflicting places to enable/disable alerts, and the correct place is in Notifications. Setting mail.biff.show_alert to always true will enable the correct operation of the system, and solve the problem that is the cause of this bug: Thunderbird never showing up in the Notifications prefpane list, and therefore never allowing badges to be turned off.

There might still be a short period, before the first new message arrives on a newly migrated system, when it might be unclear how to turn off the badge. But that will clear itself up soon. To be certain though, Thunderbird could fire a "Thunderbird v.xxx" or some such alert, if it detects it's been newly installed or there's been an OS upgrade. Not sure if that's easy code-wise though.

> We are enabling user to use a custom sound for alerts. That is a
> differentiation point with other apps.

See my comment in bug 981769.

I hope I've explained myself somewhat clearly, and again thanks for your attention to it.

Comment 15

[Javi Rueda :javirid]

I think I can see your point now, Sum. Also, I have seen that the "Play notification sound" appeared also on OS X 10.8. Sorry about my confusion.

I have created bug 1106815 so that, in OS X 10.8 and later versions, alerts are always shown so user can manage that setting from the system-wyde provided interface.

Please, note that the creation of that bug report doesn't mean that this is going to be fixed (soon).

Comment 16

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

There is a mock up in bug 574693. Shall we collapse that and bug 297033 into this one?  Or centralize on bug 574693?

Comment 17

[Javi Rueda :javirid]

I would close this one, as now we are directing users to thew System Preferences, where they could disable the badge on the dock icon, Wayne.

And bug 297033 could remain as it is, requiring the implementation of the code which instructs Thunderbird to notify OS X that a badge with some text could be shown, if user has set it this way on the System Preferences. Bug 297033 is about badging new non-email content I am going to see if it can be confirmed right now.

Comment 18

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Thanks. 

Are bug 1053345 or bug 1055064 duplicate of bug 981769?

Comment 19

[Javi Rueda :javirid]

I have changed the resolution on the bugs.