gwl: Notification badge usability issues

[anaximeno]

I've been making some tests to the new notification badge features, these are my findings:

1. Notification badge appearing in a workspace where it doesn't have a window instance

notification-badge-appearing-in-workspace-not-of.-notifiaction-window.mp4

As you can see there's a workspace where I don't have any firefox windows, and with the "show windows in all workspaces" feature disabled the grouped workspace switcher won't show that there are firefox instances there yet still notification badge is showing.

2. Notification badge is removed when I resume to a firefox window when it isn't the window where the notification came from

notification-removing-while-not-on-the-correct-window-instance.mp4

This removes a bit the efficacy of the notification if I accidentaly go to a different instance of the opened window.

3. When there are multiple open instances of the window, there's no reliable way to know which window the notification came from

This would be an additional UX suggestion, what I would suggest here is in the thumnail around where it shows the window title that it shows something refferring to notifications on the window like for example: <title> \n %n notification(s)

when-multiple-window-which-window-is-of-notification.mp4

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For what I can see these issues all boil down to having a way to reliably attach the notification to the window instance that sent it.

Pinging @fredcw since he worked on this iirc.

[fredcw]

1. I think many people may see this as a good thing because it alerts you to a notification on another workspace.
   2 & 3. Yes, there is no reliable or consistent way to determine which window of an app a notification is most relevant to, if any. There is no standard or protocol to add this info to the notification.

[JosephMcc]

I think you are mostly running into limitations of what's actually possible with this. It's a bit limited in what you can actually do.

[anaximeno]

1. I think many people may see this as a good thing because it alerts you to a notification on another workspace.

I disgree with this specially because there's an option which can allow for presenting context of other workspaces in current one if that's what the user wants, and another reason I disgree with is because you're showing something that the user can't access or act on directly by clicking in the icon that's showing it, since what it'll do at most is opening another window leading to case 2. (that will in that case just remove the notification), which can as well, thanks to this feature being enabled by default, even confuse the user in what is the meaning of that since it has no reliable way of showing what it represents and for what it is appointing to at least, in these cases.

2 & 3. Yes, there is no reliable or consistent way to determine which window of an app a notification is most relevant to, if any. There is no standard or protocol to add this info to the notification.

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I think you are mostly running into limitations of what's actually possible with this. It's a bit limited in what you can actually do.

I see, I understand it is a limitation, if there were any workaround to this would be interesting though, otherwise I would suggest at least letting it disabled by default while that can't be figured out, and letting the user enable that in conscience.

[clefebvre]

Thanks for pointing this out. It's good to have that issue in mind.

I'm not 100% sure, but I think Joseph and Fred are right in the fact that notifications can't be traced back to a particular window. Is it a limitation in Cinnamon though? or the underlying notification framework.. I'm not sure.

In the meantime, even though, this is a bug, I think that vast majority of users only use one workspace, so I don't see a reason to disable that feature because of that.