Notifications in Firefox
By glazou on Thursday 24 December 2009, 11:07 - Mozilla - Permalink
I think Notifications in Firefox are a problem; a light problem but still. A lot, I mean really a lot, of users don't see them (yes, that's surprising but they just do not notice a notification box appeared) and don't understand them because the prose in the notification box is sometimes too laconic. That triggers emails to extension authors, support, hotline that could be avoided and in some cases the users just flee away, thinking something does not work or is wrong with the web site.
A simple way to do that would be a dual system, popups and notifications. By default at first launch, Firefox uses popups for notifications and these popups contain a checkbox "Check this box if you prefer notification boxes in the browser's window instead of popups". So the user can move to notification boxes if that's his/her desire.
Just my two eurocents.
Comments
And what about the notifications systems availlable OS wide?
I'm talking about ubuntu and it's notification applet, but other OSes might implement similar services.
Nice idea but keep in mind lots of people don't read popups! They just close them or click "OK", especially if they *think* it's one they've seen before. I also am guilty.
Perhaps giving a popup or notification a large picture of the icon of the add-on that triggered it could help deter this by easily identifying who is sending you a notice.
And remember that the user won't necessarily be sitting down at their computer when a notification shows, so for CRITICAL information you probably don't want to use them in the first place, a popup would be a better choice, or giving a notification no auto-closing behavior.
One last thing... botifications are too small right now IIRC, making them bigger would help ensure people see them. You could even make them animate a bit to catch the user's attention, though if not done tastefully this will get old fast.
Nice idea, but I don't think it will work. Microsoft has for some time been using a kind of wizard that appears in the content area in Internet Explorer (at least in 7, not sure of 8). The number of people I encountered that don't read this wizard to setup the browser correctly is so large that I stopped counting. Secondly, if a browser is started people want it to use to browse the web, changing settings before you can use the browser is simply frustrating.
You can't make users pay attention. Whatever you put in front of them, if they feel it's not immediately relevant they will learn to ignore it. If you do manage to make it *really* annoying, they'll switch to another product that's less annoying.
Therefore notifications have to be ignorable and non-modal notifications like in Firefox work well for that.
FWIW, this project aims at improving the notification system: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox/Pr...
Tangentially related to your post - I wrote a Firefox extension called Yip that allows web apps (using the Prism/Fluid APIs) to use the OS-wide notification system. http://blog.abi.sh/2009/yip-0-2-cal...