Tuomas Heittola Reporter
	Description • 14 years ago

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; en-US; rv:1.9.2.13) Gecko/20101203 Firefox/3.6.13
Build Identifier: 

The change in Bug 615318 has made making notifications that only inform the user about something difficult. Meaning notifications that only tell the user that something happened.

The most logical thing for these kind of notifications would be to have an OK-button. But if you have an OK-button, that OK-button will have a "Not now" -option. Choosing to "Not now" something that has already happened doesn't make much sense.

The other way to do this is to have no buttons at all, but that has two downsides. 1) User who do not understand that you can dismiss the notification by clicking outside of it don't know what to do 2) Users can't remove the notification, because there is no action on it.

Reproducible: Always

	:Gavin Sharp [email: gavin@gavinsharp.com]
	Comment 1 • 14 years ago

Maybe we should add a flag to show()'s |options| parameter to control this, or even make it opt-in rather than opt-out...

	:Margaret Leibovic
	Comment 2 • 14 years ago

If it's opt-in, we'd have to rely on developers to follow some sort of guideline for when to include it, which could lead to inconsistent notifications if they don't include it when they should. I think it makes more sense for it to be opt-out. We would only want to get rid of the "Not Now" option when there's no user action to take, which basically only happens if there's an OK button, right?

	Luke Iliffe (Harlequin99)
	Comment 3 • 14 years ago

Maybe relevant; bug 617553 comment 4 from Alex Faaborg - "doorhangers were never meant for app level notifications" Speaking about extension installation dialogs.

Is it a case of doorhangers being used where a different form of dialog (e.g. app modal) would be more appropriate, or just a case where the "not now" option needs to be present/absent on a case by case basis?

	:Gavin Sharp [email: gavin@gavinsharp.com]
	Comment 4 • 14 years ago

Extension install notifications aren't really "application level", in that they are a request from the specific site to install the addon (aside from the drag-XPI-to-window case that we have other bugs covering).

I actually kind of misunderstood this bug - it is still possible to have doorhangers that have no actions at all, right (null mainAction/secondaryActions)? That's really what you should use if you want a doorhanger for notification purposes only.

	Tuomas Heittola Reporter
	Comment 5 • 14 years ago

Yeah, having null actions works. The trouble with that is that there is no way to remove the notification then. You can only dismiss it, but even that has the problem of some users not realizing you can click outside of the panel to do that (unless Bug 615315 is done).

Opt-out would be my choice. Probably in almost all other actions besides "OK" having "Not now" is appropriate.

	Justin Dolske [:Dolske]
	Comment 6 • 14 years ago

I'll let faaborg comment, but I think the intention for this UI means this would be wontfix... Doorhangers are not really meant for actionless notifications, as an "ok" button would imply (in fact, why even have an OK button). The intent is that these ask the user a question in a non-intrusive way, and the button should have an action-oriented label.

	Tuomas Heittola Reporter
	Comment 7 • 14 years ago

I see.

Maybe it's just my special case, but I think it would be nice to have the ability display information in a non-intrusive way too.

	Alex Faaborg [:faaborg] (Firefox UX)
	Comment 8 • 14 years ago

>Doorhangers are not really meant for actionless
>notifications, as an "ok" button would imply (in fact, why even have an OK
>button). The intent is that these ask the user a question in a non-intrusive
>way, and the button should have an action-oriented label.

There may be a few very rare cases where we want to have a doorhanger that doesn't ask a question, but is the response to an action.  For instance the sync button could display a "Sync Complete" message.  But in these cases, there shouldn't be a button on the doorhanger, the only option should be for the user to indicate "meh" by dismissing it.  Also, these generally should not be displayed un-prompted (at least in Firefox's UI).

	Matthew N. [:MattN]
	Comment 9 • 11 years ago

Bulk move to Toolkit::Notifications and Alerts

Filter on notifications-and-alerts-component.