Real estates for accessible communication with the user

[chrmod]

WebExtension, being re-active in nature, have limited opportunity to get user attention. The only reliable way to show user a message is to inject it to pages, which not only requires host permission but can also be considered obtrusive.

Use cases:

• update notes
• produce announcements
• information about breakage
• reminders

Potential real estates:

• new tab page (when controller by the browser) could offer a dedicated content box or mix it with news
• browser action can popup with animation (to get some attention) in case it is hidden in the "puzzle menu"
• other: maybe special UI below the URL bar

Challenges:

• what if multiple addons want to show some information at the same time

[dotproto]

This might be a good area to explore with folks from the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI). Tagging #843 for possible formal or serendipitous discussion during TPAC.

[Rob--W]

This might be a good area to explore with folks from the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI). Tagging #843 for possible formal or serendipitous discussion during TPAC.

"accessible" in this topic has nothing to do with Web Accessibility. The word "accessible" here was used in the sense of "discoverable".

[rdcronin]

Thanks for filing the issue, Krzysztof!

We discussed this at TPAC today.

We recognize that this is a painpoint for extensions today. We offer a few different surfaces with different levels of noisiness. On the noisy side, we have opening a new tab, browser action popup, or using the notifications API. On the less noisy side, there's things like badging / updating the browser action. For contextual / page notifications, extensions can inject content scripts to add their own UI (though this should only be done in appropriate circumstances).

We are always interested and open to exploring new surfaces to expose to extensions (and, in Chrome, we've thought about allowing extensions to add content to the New Tab Page without overriding the whole page). However, we'd look at these on a case-by-case basis, and would want each to be flexible for different use cases.

Since this is a pretty broad topic, we concluded that, while we're supportive of exploring these areas, there's not a clear enough action item to keep this open. Other issues can be filed for individual requests / investigations. Given this, I'm going to close this out, but if you want to file any issues for concrete requests or proposals, we'd be happy to discuss them more!