Only the most anti-social sites break the back button, I kill the tab of any site that does.
What I hate and is much more common is the "do you want notifications". I'd love a "never ask about notifications again" option.
What I hate and is much more common is the "do you want notifications". I'd love a "never ask about notifications again" option.
In the old days, you needed an RCE and some malware to do desktop popups. Now it's apparently just a feature. It's becoming an increasingly abused function.
Seriously, ad&tracking blocking is the first thing I do when I have to fix up a computer for a friend or family member.
Just set it to "never ask" or something similar and it will auto-deny all notification permission requests.
You can also enable it for specific sites if you want.
People don't read dialogs, they just don't. And giving them the option of "never ask again for any site" would most likely mean that some would hit it and it wouldn't even register that it was something they did, let alone remember they did it for the rest of their time using that browser.
Then you start getting complaints about how Firefox has this notification feature but chrome doesn't, or notifications are broken on my chrome, or whatever else.
That's why I'm hopeful for some new browser APIs which will manage permissions across the board, and will use things like heuristics to allow or disallow asking for permissions based on things like amount of interaction, number of times they interact with the website, and the "kind" of site it is (a PWA should be allowed to ask for notifications fairly early on in the process of using it, a news website should have to wait until the user has come back at least a few times before being able to ask).
I don't envy browser vendors for having to make decisions on what is and isn't allowed there, because no matter what some well meaning sites will be caught in the crossfire, but it's by far the "least bad" solution in my opinion.
The problem is that there's lots of content the publisher thinks is notification worthy, but not the user. No, I don't need a notification every time you post to RandomNewsSite.com.
That would still annoy the hell out of me.
My default is now "select all, delete"
That’s why they invest heavily in Chrome (and FF, to some degree), and work on all sorts of APIs like notifications, WebAudio, etc.
The decision process is probably not far off from “could a sandboxed, locally installed, native app do this?”
Turning notifications off by default would probably err to far on the other side. At the very least, they would want some noticeable UI indicator that notifications are available. I could also see it becoming a feature only available to sites after x visits/y days.
It'd be interesting if browsers had a default setting that didn't allow a site to ask for notifications until you had switched to the tab and left it open a handful of times, or if they expired notifications automatically after you hadn't been to a site for a few days. It would also be interesting if they only allowed them for "pinned" tabs.
For those trying to find it. It's settings -> advanced -> content settings -> notifications.
So you can turn off the top slider from "ask before sending" to blocked. Probably a good time to check your "allow" list on the same page. My blocked list is about 100 long.
Notifications can be disabled as explained here: https://blog.mozilla.org/firefox/no-notifications/
PS: for example, quick screenshot from one news site with notifications: https://imgur.com/a/zWdJqMo
Evil
Once you're aware of it, it's simple enough to hold the back button and then go back several entries at once, but maybe this change will remove the "when I hit back, it goes back and then forward to where I was when I hit back" behavior in the first place.
I believe this is one of the intended effects. For example, when you click on a link after a Google search, and then click the back button to go back to the search results, I imagine Google records this to downrank that page for that query in a small way. When you kill the tab, you forfeit this opportunity.