Make browser window blink in task Bar

Question

How do I make a user s browser blink flash highlight in the task bar using JavaScript  For example  if I make an AJAX request every 10 seconds to see if the user has any new messages on the server  I want the user to know it right away  even if he is using another application at the time   Edit  These users do want to be distracted when a new message arrives

User · Answer

Why not take the approach that GMail uses and show the number of messages in the page title   Sometimes users don t want to be distracted when a new message arrives

User · Answer

The only way I can think of doing this is by doing something like alert  you have a new message   when the message is received  This will flash the taskbar if the window is minimized  but it will also open a dialog box  which you may not want

User · Answer

var oldTitle   document title                  var msg    New Popup                    var timeoutId   false                   var blink   function                         document title   document title    msg   oldTitle   msg   Modify Title in case a popup                      if document hasFocus     Stop blinking and restore the Application Title                                               document title   oldTitle                          clearInterval timeoutId                                                                                    if   timeoutId                        timeoutId   setInterval blink  500    Initiate the Blink Call                     Blink logic

User · Answer

My  user interface  response is  Are you sure your users want their browsers flashing  or do you think that s what they want  If I were the one using your software  I know I d be annoyed if these alerts happened very often and got in my way   If you re sure you want to do it this way  use a javascript alert box  That s what Google Calendar does for event reminders  and they probably put some thought into it   A web page really isn t the best medium for need-to-know alerts  If you re designing something along the lines of  ZOMG  the servers are down   alerts  automated e-mails or SMS messages to the right people might do the trick

User · Answer

You may want to try window focus   - but it may be annoying if the screen switches around

User · Answer

you could change the title of the web page with each new message to alert the user  I did this for a browser chat client and most users thought it worked well enough    document title     user  hello world

User · Answer

Supposedly you can do this on windows with the growl for windows javascript API   http   ajaxian com archives growls-for-windows-and-a-web-notification-api  Your users will have to install growl though   Eventually this is going to be part of google gears  in the form of the NotificationAPI   http   code google com p gears wiki NotificationAPI  So I would recommend using the growl approach for now  falling back to window title updates if possible  and already engineering in attempts to use the Gears Notification API  for when it eventually becomes available

User · Answer

function blinkTab             const browserTitle   document title          let timeoutId          let message    My New Title            const stopBlinking        gt                document title   browserTitle              clearInterval timeoutId                       const startBlinking        gt                document title   document title      message   browserTitle   message                      function registerEvents                 window addEventListener  focus   function event                     stopBlinking                                 window addEventListener  blur   function event                    const timeoutId   setInterval startBlinking  500                                       registerEvents                 blinkTab

User · Answer

These users do want to be distracted when a new message arrives    It sounds like you re writing an app for an internal company project    You might want to investigate writing a small windows app in  net which adds a notify icon and can then do fancy popups or balloon popups or whatever  when they get new messages   This isn t overly hard and I m sure if you ask SO  how do I show a tray icon  and  how do I do pop up notifications  you ll get some great answers  -   For the record  I m pretty sure that  other than using an alert prompt dialog box  you can t flash the taskbar in JS  as this is heavily windows specific  and JS really doesn t work like that  You may be able to use some IE-specific windows activex controls  but then you inflict IE upon your poor users  Don t do that  -

User · Answer

this won t make the taskbar button flash in changing colours  but the title will blink on and off until they move the mouse  This should work cross platform  and even if they just have it in a different tab   newExcitingAlerts    function          var oldTitle   document title      var msg    New        var timeoutId      var blink   function     document title   document title    msg         msg         var clear   function             clearInterval timeoutId           document title   oldTitle          window onmousemove   null          timeoutId   null             return function              if   timeoutId                timeoutId   setInterval blink  1000               window onmousemove   clear                             Update  You may want to look at using HTML5 notifications

User · Answer

I ve made a jQuery plugin for the purpose of blinking notification messages in the browser title bar  You can specify different options like blinking interval  duration  if the blinking should stop when the window tab gets focused  etc  The plugin works in Firefox  Chrome  Safari  IE6  IE7 and IE8   Here is an example on how to use it     titleAlert  New mail          requireBlur true      stopOnFocus true      interval 600       If you re not using jQuery  you might still want to look at the source code  there are a few quirky bugs and edge cases that you need to work around when doing title blinking if you want to fully support all major browsers

User · Answer

quot Make browser window blink in task Bar quot  via Javascript   is not possible

User · Answer

AFAIK  there is no good way to do this with consistency  I was writing an IE only web-based IM client  We ended up using window focus    which works most of the time  Sometimes it will actually cause the window to steal focus from the foreground app  which can be really annoying

[javascript] Make browser window blink in task Bar

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