488566 - Use Windows-native notifications for nsIAlertsService on Windows

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 1155505

(Toolkit Graveyard :: Notifications and Alerts, enhancement)

Description

[Mike Connor [:mconnor]]

Our notifications on Windows look like crap, and rely on faking the toaster effect.  We should just use balloon notifications like the rest of the world, and get everything for free.

Comment 1

[Mark Finkle (:mfinkle) (use needinfo?)]

Windows balloon notifications appear to "point" to an item in the task tray. Does that mean we plan to inject a tray icon item for the notification?

Comment 2

[Vladimir Vukicevic [:vlad] [:vladv] (needinfo me, slow to respond)]

They don't have to, I don't think?  There are non-balloon style notifications, and I'm pretty sure vista/7 don't use balloons at all.

Comment 3

[Mike Connor [:mconnor]]

I'm pretty sure they do, actually (though I can't remember how to trigger one on this Windows 7 install), but I'm okay with temporarily having an icon injected...

Comment 4

[Masatoshi Kimura [:emk]]

Why the Platform is set to "Mac OS X"?

Comment 5

[Thomas Stache]

The need of an icon for balloon notifications was just recently a topic on "The old new thing" http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2009/05/04/9585032.aspx

Comment 6

[Jim Mathies [:jimm]]

Isn't this bug dead thanks to our new notifications system coming out 4.0.

Comment 7

[Mike Beltzner [:beltzner, not reading bugmail]]

I don't think so - we want to be able to use the OS-provided system for things like "Firefox has an update" yatta yatta. Alex/Shorlander/Limi?

Comment 8

[Alex Faaborg [:faaborg] (Firefox UX)]

I would like to transition all of our notifications to being in the application itself (both related to Firefox and to a particular site).  System tray level notifications like our current Toast style, or the native bubbles, are really for OS level things.  Also, the system tray tends to feel very messy and spamy (RealTek HD Audio Manager, WTF?) and it isn't really the place we want the user to see a Firefox icon.

Comment 9

[Mike Beltzner [:beltzner, not reading bugmail]]

OK, I still don't think this is dead, as it's a Gecko level service and other apps might want to be able to work on it. At the same time, it's not a Firefox priority as per comment 8.

Comment 10

[Mike Connor [:mconnor]]

Alex, is it worth making sure this falls back somehow?  Especially on OS X, but on all platforms you may not have a main window open.

Also, the nice thing about the systray notification on Windows is that it's consistent with other apps, and doesn't need to take up our UI for the persistent indicator (if we care about that case)

Comment 11

[Alex Faaborg [:faaborg] (Firefox UX)]

You're primarily talking about the notification for software update, right?  There aren't really that many other situations when Firefox needs to address the user (extension update notifications were finally removed).  For software update it seems like we should either:

1) not bother the user because the update isn't a big deal and they'll get around to restarting eventually
2) stick a modal dialog box on screen because the update is incredibly important and they need to apply it Right Now (!!1!)

The system tray notifications are in between these two, louder than silent, but usually not loud enough to actually get the user act on (just ask Adobe updater, which has been poking me all day and I've been beating it back down).

I agree with Beltzner that this would be a nice thing to allow other apps built on our platform access to, but in terms of the Firefox UI, I don't see where we would make good use of it.

Perhaps one exception would be a notification similar to Chrome, where we remind the user to switch back to our product after a certain number of days of inactivity.  That maintains all of the negative aspects of the system tray, but is nonetheless an example of us needing to invoke a notification from outside of the application itself (in this case the application isn't even running).

Comment 12

[Marco Castelluccio [:marco]]

Notifications are useful also for finished downloads.

Comment 13

[Matthew N. [:MattN]]

Bulk move to Toolkit::Notifications and Alerts

Filter on notifications-and-alerts-component.