527848 - Provide a method to call attention to a tab for web content

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

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

Description

[Eli Grey (:sephr)]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-US) AppleWebKit/532.4 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/4.0.237.0 Safari/532.4
Build Identifier: 

It would be nice if there was a method to call attention to a tab for web content. For example, if you get a new message in a web application, this method could be called to attract attention to said tab. It would do nothing if the tab is currently being viewed already. The attention-getting effect could be something such as pulsating the tab between two different colors or making the tab's text emphasized in some manner (or both).

Currently, most web applications rapidly change the page title to attract attention from the user of an event or change. Two examples of popular sites that do this are Omeggle, and Firefox's default site for handling the IRC protocol: Mibbit.

Does `window.getAttention` sound any good?

Reproducible: Always

Comment 1

[Eli Grey (:sephr)]

I also think that the method should be able to take one parameter, a description of the event. This description could be used to provide more information to the user without them having to view the tab requesting attention to see what happened.

Comment 2

[Olli Pettay [:smaug][[e-mail]]]

This kind of discussion should happen on WebApps WG mailing list.

Comment 3

[Olli Pettay [:smaug][[e-mail]]]

For chrome we have getAttention
http://mxr.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/source/dom/interfaces/base/nsIDOMChromeWindow.idl#61

Comment 4

[Olli Pettay [:smaug][[e-mail]]]

...but that is for the window, not tab.

Comment 5

[:Ms2ger (he/him; ⌚ UTC+1/+2)]

Please do start the discussion in the WebApps WG. Until then, marking invalid.