I think it may be a challenge to position those notification icons where the user notices them. Things like RSS may be subtly, as long as the user knows where to look (and I doubt most users use it anyway, they are content with what they know).

Making Phishing alerts modal might hinder usability again, though. Might need some testing but I suspect users (i. e. non-developers or tech geeks) will still be able to miss it, especially as the dialog is probably not in the exact spot they’re looking. Maybe having a kind of “sandbox” model for this case might work where forms on suspected phishing sites can’t be submitted before deactivating security for that site explicitly. Might be challenging to make that discoverable, though.

Well, just my little opinion, albeit pretty late

I used to use the BT Yahoo browser, and although I hardly miss it I do think the pop-up notification was better. If a pop-up was blocked a small notification (roughly 100×70 at the most) popped up at the bottom right of the screen for ~5 seconds. It informed me that a pop-up had been blocked from ‘http://…’ and a small one word link was provided to ‘view’ the pop-up.

If you ignored the notification it would soon disappear, no harm done because I don’t remember it blocking any useful info on a site.

Other notifications haven’t been bothering me too much, the yellow pop-up bar is the one that I find overly intrusive.

Thanks mate,

Ian

Another advantage of your proposal is that it is a centralized system. Which means that the notifications have similiar/same appearance and appear at a fixed point(top right in this case).

So, in a matter of days or weeks the user gets used to the point of income and knows where the notification will appear. This is much better than the actual notifications.

Also keep in mind and i hope that if this gets accepted, that you make a guideline that the Extension developers will follow. So that they don’t make an extension that will display notifications in another way, and therefore breaking the “centralized system”.

On another note, if this doesn’t get accepted, what do you think about making Growl for Mac the default notification system for Firefox and for the Pc using Snarl which can be found here: http://fullphat.net ?

Finally my answer is YES, use the system you’ve suggested.

I talked with my friend Lutzky (http://yasmin.technion.ac.il/ohad) about my earlier post in huminized(http://www.humanized.com/weblog/2007/06/19/humanized_puzzler_2_firefox_tabs/index.php#comment-29729) , and i think we came up with a good solution

use the suggested “expanding tab” mouse-over like the apple dock does, but also add the following twist, if the mouse-wheel is scrolling outside the browser window, while Firefox is the chosen application, the tabs will “mouse-over” one by one startng from the current tab

by using the third wheel you gain maximum control over the mouse-over without having to physically mouse over the tab-bar

and because all you need to do is go to this “tab-browsing” state is move the mouse violently to the edge of your screen, you can move between “choosing tab” to “reading content” with practicly no thought involved

those that like the new 2.0 version still get the benifits, as well as those that like the old 1.5

Right now that box is my most hated feature. 90% of the time I’m entering a password for a site I don’t visit often, and I’m not sure if I’ve got it right. Almost every time that dialogue pops up, I’m unable to confidently answer it. In a matter of microseconds, I will know whether the password works, and if it does, of course I want to remember it. If it doesn’t, of course I don’t. But I can’t get to that microsecond without making the decision it will inform, and once I have, I can’t easily go back and change my answer.

A level-3 interruption is fine, but the vital thing is that I need to be able to answer /after/ submitting my password. Whether that means keeping it up for a few seconds after leaving the page that raised it, or leaving the icon present while you stay at the resulting page, I don’t know.

1 Open two Firefox tabs in the same window
2. Type javascript:alert('test') into the first tab’s location bar
3. The dialog that pops up is modal to the entire browser, even though it only applies to the first tab.

Now, try something different:
1. Open two Firefox windows
2. Type javascript:alert('test') into the first window’s location bar
3. The dialog that pops up is modal only to the window that called it. The other window can still be worked with.

See

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=123913

for a related bug, and

http://mysite.verizon.net/negatron/custom_alert.htm

for a mock-up of how I think these dialogs should be implemented.