Open newtab notifications more intelligently
Background / User story
In Adblock Plus 3.8.3 we added support for notifications to open in a new tab (see https://gitlab.com/eyeo/adblockplus/adblockpluscore/-/issues/162 and eyeo/adblockplus/adblockpluschrome#162 (closed)) by waiting until the user opens a new tab and then creating an additional new tab for the notification, in order to avoid interferring with anything the user is doing or distracting the user.
However, we found that it was still causing problems because users were opening new tabs as part of a bigger flow (e.g. user opening a link in a tab; page opening a new tab to continue with a checkout process). Therefore we should investigate what we can do in order to avoid interferring with those multi-tab tasks.
Additionally, we have found that users can't easily tell whether the tab we're opening is legitimate or not. Therefore we should also watch out for making it look more legitimate (e.g. by creating a stronger connection with the extension UI).
Example options
| Option | Obtrusiveness | Legitimacy | Reach |
|---|---|---|---|
| A: Open when user opens new empty tab | Could still be distracting, since the user opened the tab in order to do something with it and may be interrupted by our tab from doing so. | Low, open tabs could open such a tab pretending to be coming from Adblock Plus | High, every user eventually opens a new tab |
| B: Open upon browser start | Minimal | Reduced, preexisting open tabs could open such a tab pretending to be coming from Adblock Plus | Reduced, some users never/rarely restart their browser |
| C: Open upon interacting with extension (e.g. similar to triggering day1 notification or Video DownloadHelper's donation page) | Reduced | High, when opening in response to an interaction that only the extension is aware of | Reduced, some users may not interact with the extension |
| D: Open upon idling | Reduced, depends on how "idle" is defined | Low, user may not see when tab is opened and open tabs could open such a tab pretending to be coming from Adblock Plus | High, every user eventually opens a new tab |
What to change
- Design: N/A
- Research: None
- Spec: https://gitlab.com/eyeo/specs/spec/-/merge_requests/353
- Legal: https://jira.eyeo.com/browse/ABPUI-43
- Development: TBD
Hints for testers
No changes to adblockplusui have been made.
Hints for translators
N/A