[Greasemonkey] Changes in CVS

[Aaron Boodman]

On 11/18/05, Johan Sundström <oyasumi at gmail.com> wrote:
> One question, though: was Anton Berezin's interpretation of
>
> > * Put one success alert back on install instead of the
> > too-hard-to-notice animation message. Now there's one
> > animation message (loading...) then an alert ("Success!")
>
> correct -- that the alert was about every installed GM script?
>
> Modal dialogs in user interface design are a little like what
> exceptions are in programming -- they are really only to be
> used for exceptional circumstances, that absolutely requires
> user attention, confirmation or intervention, before moving on.
> It's a very severe infliction on the user's browsing session, as
> it will freeze any other actions the user is trying to do, and in
> all other tabs of the same browser window too, none the less.

I completely agree with your basis here and that's why I put the
animation in, in the first place. The problem is that users do require
some acknowledgement that something has happened. In my experience,
most people didn't even notice the subtle animation, and so it seemed
like Greasemonkey did absolutely nothing, that it wasn't working.

Ideally, I'd like to put in a little status "toast" animation like
what windows does: a little panel that slides up in the corner that
tells you what happened. Or some other sort of subtle-but-noticeable
feedback.

But none of these things are supported in Firefox. Even getting the
install bar to show up was a quest of mamoth proportions as it doesn't
have much of a useable API.

So I'm left with two choices for the immediate term: leave the
animation (a vast number of users thing Greasemonkey just doesn't
work), or scale back the current (0.5.3) confirmation dialog -
downloading dialog - install success dialog procession to a
downloading animation followed by a success dialog. This annoys some
number of users, but I think it's mostly developers who are repeatedly
installing scripts. They should edit the scripts directly to avoid
this.

So for now I chose the second option, but I will revisit it. If you're
super passionate about this issue, you could write a patch to not show
the dialog depending on a preference.

- a