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Comment by adrianmonk | Hacker News Reader

I'm still shocked that anybody thought the first generation implementation of this (in any browser, not specific to Firefox) was ever a good idea. I can see making the request visible to the end user, but... as a dialog? Why?

At least make it a narrow bar across the top/bottom that doesn't obscure web site content and can be easily ignored. Perhaps better would be to make it a button like there is a button to favorite/bookmark a site. A dialog isn't even near the top of the list of good designs.

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Agreed completely.

- Why are dialogs still a thing?

- Why is stealing focus still a thing?

Browser makers, operating system manufacturers: Stop it. Dialogs are hot garbage, and users ALONE should have control over input focus. If you need the user's attention flash/animate.

If you cannot make a thing without a dialog, focus lock, or focus theft then maybe the thing you were trying to make was inherently a bad idea.

Windows is terrible at this. I was running the Visual Studio Installer in the background and it stole key-input focus dozens of times, often going to black dialog boxes that immediately closed leaving focus on nothing.

Firefox and Chrome don't steal focus in this dialog. It's not modal either.

Firefox absolutely steals focus for this permissions dialog, as recently as AFTER you made that post (Firefox 66.0.1).

Can't reproduce. Tried stern.de, Firefox 66. Scrolling with keys still works. I tried clicking the search as fast as possible before the permissions dialog comes. Key input still works after dialog appears.

I had no idea wth you were talking about until you mentioned Visual Studio Installer, then I knew immediately what you meant.

This is a huge problem for Windows and Mac.

Open notepad. Press a key over and over. If the key-press stops going to notepad then focus has been transferred/stolen. Firefox's Notification Permission dialog has this behavior within the browser.

For example go to Reddit or Facebook, start entering text, the notification permission dialog will appear, steal focus, and now your key-presses go into a black hole.

The whole concept of focus-theft is an anti-pattern. Interestingly one mobile operating systems originally designed out but has slowly been creeping back in.

Every time it happens, I feel like Charlie Brown trying to kick that football: https://peanuts.fandom.com/wiki/Football_gag

Steam also has this problem in Linux, though that's the only program I can think of. Opening Steam results in three different windows stealing focus in sequence for no other reason than to tell you that Steam is in the process of opening.

4 for me. Updating, logging in, the client, and the ads.

I removed it from my panel just so I'd stop waiting for these if I misclicked it.

Software on Linux is not always better. IntelliJ for example took focus two times on startup for a long time.

For years browser vendors have displayed little yellow infobars at the top of the screen related to page functionality. These were visible enough but didn't demand immediate action in the way a dialog taking focus and overlaying the browser chrome and page does. Browser vendors had better UX options to choose.

And push notifications definitely fall into the "this is something you might wish to do to enhance page functionality" category rather than "this is something the browser needs you to action" category associated with dialog boxes.

As long as the websites that request the permission have a legitimate reason to show notifications, a dialog is actually a good idea - it makes it easy for users to enable notifications, whereas a toolbar button would be easy to miss. If browsers had anticipated every random news site asking to show notifications, I imagine it would have been designed differently.

No, it's not.

Currently on legitimate and decently built sites I get a custom JS modal popup that asks me to accept the location request before they even request location access. They do this because otherwise their location request gets dismissed by users out of habbit and then people don't know how to reenable it.

It's shit UX.

Notifications and always on location access should be a bell icon in the url bar. Think YouTube notifications.

On top of that, there should be a "use location" html element that sets it's value to the current location when clicked. It would also be nice if that threw up a warning when proxy settings are detected.

I think this bell meme is less widespread than you think. I can't imagine the people I know concluding that the notification permission is hidden under a bell icon, let alone find it intuitive.

Au contraire, i think the bell meme is more widespread than you think. Taking India as an example, the lower levels of literacy has actually made video content the primary form of online content. And with youtube being one of the major portals of such content and with every youtuber in every corner of the globe nagging subscibers (in their native language) to click that bell icon i think it has already spread to a large demographic.

I wasn't claiming it was well known, in this case I don't think it matters. I assumed anyone that really cares would throw up an arrow and some blinking text pointing at it. Yes, this will be ugly, just like every site I visit asking if they can send me private messages whenever they want is ugly.

That said, the bell icon not being intuitive doesnt stop YouTube.

Likewise, channels switched to "like, comment, subscribe, and don't forget to hit the bell." Literally overnight.

I just see this concern as a non issue.

Also because some browsers once you deny you can't re-request. but you can show as many html 'overlay prompts' as you want

It is literally being used to abuse less tech literate ppl (elderly, children, non english speakers, non-tech savvy people, people from third world countries).

Such people just click yes yes yes to these popups without reading them (thinking theyre EU cookie, T&C, privacy prompts, etc). Its a prime vector for malwartisements these days.

Didn't they? It sounds strange to assume that nobody ever wondered how this feature might be abused - it's not like that hasn't happened before in the history of browsers.

I find it particularly weird that Firefox has that great annoying popup for notifications, but reports suppressed pop-ups with an obvious but unobtrusive top bar. Why not use exactly the same construct for notifications?

it seemed more a protest to having to. as is it is bad and i could not believe the way they did it.

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