774082 - App tab notifications should NOT happen on document.title change

Status: UNCONFIRMED

(Firefox :: General, defect)

Description

[Yves Van Goethem]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.7; rv:14.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/14.0
Build ID: 20120710123126

Steps to reproduce:

Pin website FOO as an App tab.



Actual results:

Website FOO changes its document.title and the app tab gets highlighted.
This is part of no specification and is clearly a hack.


Expected results:

There should be a specific API to notify app tabs about changes.

Comment 1

[Sonny Piers [:sonny]]

While I agree in some case it mights be annoying for the user, a lot of web applications use document.title to notify.
The correct fix for this use case is probably to get a proper notification API and not highlight the tab when it's in use.

Comment 2

[Justin Dolske [:Dolske]]

This is entirely as intended. The point is that few if any sites would bother to explicitly add a new API for this use case, making the apptab hilighting generally useless as a result.

Comment 3

[Yves Van Goethem]

While some applications might take advantage of such an arbitrary feature, more complex websites require more flexibility and control over visual notifications in Firefox.

For example, SoundCloud implements "continuous playback", the document.title adapts to the sound that is being played, and there is no reason for the application to show a visual notification about it. It is not considered important in the context of a pinned tab and since the sound changed the user is naturally notified.

Another example is Spotify, its title displays the position in a song and therefor updates every second.

In both of these cases the authors don't have the choice, a feature that might be seen as beneficial in some applications becomes the exact opposite in these applications.

As Sonny already mentioned, I think this has a bad impact on Firefox, people might get confused in the first place and then start ignoring these notifications all together, which is certainly not to the benefit of the whole idea.

So, I understand we cannot change this behavior as it was implemented and authors rely on it, but we can certainly give authors more control over the feature and allow them to disable it for title changes.
Maybe with something like document.titleNotify = false

I hope these examples give more clarity into what the issue is and how it could be solved.
Let me know if I can be of any help.

- Yves

Comment 4

[Sonny Piers [:sonny]]

An other use case in favor of this bug: I have a single web page appp that always serves my index whatever the pathname is and use the history API. Once it's loaded, my script change the title according to the pathname. So when the the app tab loads with a pathname, it gets the visual notification even so nothing interesting has happen.