410070 - Password bar should auto close after a few seconds

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Toolkit :: Password Manager, enhancement)

Description

[David Weitz]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9b3pre) Gecko/2007122805 Minefield/3.0b3pre
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9b3pre) Gecko/2007122805 Minefield/3.0b3pre

I think that the password bar that pops down after you submit a password should auto close after a few seconds so you don't have to go up and click the x button to get rid of it.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Enter a password into the form
2.
3.
Actual Results:  
Bar drops down and stays there forever unless clicked off

Expected Results:  
Bar should automatically fold up after a few seconds

It should stay long enough that the user has time to click never remember or remember, but short enough so that the user doesn't feel that s/he has to close it themselves.

Comment 1

[Ria Klaassen (not reading all bugmail)]

It would make me nervous (hurry, hurry, for the bar will disappear within a few seconds) but confirming as a new bug for consideration.

Comment 2

[David Weitz]

Well when you enter a password and hit enter, I think you already know whether you want to save it or not. So the bar doesn't have to be there that long for you to decide.

Comment 3

[Mats Palmgren (inactive)]

I agree with Ria.  I don't want to be forced to act quickly.
Other popup panels (e.g. plugin installer) doesn't time out (AFAIK) and it
would be confusing if some do and others don't.  Probably bad for a11y too.

Comment 4

[:Gavin Sharp [email: [e-mail]]]

(In reply to comment #2)
> Well when you enter a password and hit enter, I think you already know whether
> you want to save it or not. So the bar doesn't have to be there that long for
> you to decide.

Sometimes the pageload takes a long time to complete (e.g. for users on dial-up), and there are often redirects involved so keying it off the first load only wouldn't work either. The current code looks at both - only dismisses the popup if one load has already been completed and 10 seconds have elapsed. Note that the patch in bug 408363 is increasing this timeout to 20 seconds - it's really kind of the opposite of this bug.

Comment 5

[David Weitz]

Well couldn't you just check to see if there was a header redirect and keep it there instead of using a timeout? Once it reached the final redirect, you could then start the counter to close the bar.

Comment 6

[Justin Dolske [:Dolske]]

The notification bar code doesn't know what caused the redirect. This was also discussed in bug 408363.

Self-dismissing UI doesn't seem like a good idea to me, for the same reasons people mentioned above. Having it randomly disappear would be a bigger annoyance than having to just ignore it.