From Firefox 72 permission prompts won’t be shown unless they’re triggered from a user interaction.
From the blog post:
> Notification prompts are very unpopular. On Release, about 99% of notification prompts go unaccepted, with 48% being actively denied by the user.
https://blog.mozilla.org/futurereleases/2019/11/04/restricti...
I’ve heard Chrome is moving in a similar direction
So that you actually know what it's used for
The need for notifications is real and Apple’s choice to exclude their availability in iOS is a business move not a technical move or a users-first move. Making PWAs better on iOS runs counter to Apple’s walled garden business model.
Every site complains about your content blocker. Every site wants to send you notifications. Every site wants your email address to advertise at you. And with PWAs, every site will want to establish a presence on your computer.
Your motives may be pure, but your chosen platform does not place you in good company.
Such as? The only use case for notifications and PWAs I'm coming across are clickbait news sites creating a sense of urgency with "homepage was updated" modals obscuring content and capturing click events. Web user agents have freedoms in rendering pages to users, and Safari siding with users and power efficiency is a good thing. In line with other comments, I predict browsers will soon provide opt-out for notifications, then eventually deprecate them altogether, like they did with popups/popunders.
Now, more importantly, Safari could work on their odd pick list control rendering like a dial wheel.
I don’t have the resources to build native and web applications for each platform.
Right now we make announcements for the next schedule item. I’d like to notify attendees via the web app I wrote and have it display schedule information offline.
You can notify them by email, SMS or using any other messenger. There's no need to force another on your customers.
> and have it display schedule information offline.
Your customers already have a calendar application, there's no need to make them visit a web page for that. At least there wouldn't if Google supported Webcal so everyone can use their favorite native applications instead. But that wouldn't push people towards Google's services and garbage web apps.
I see a lot of people advocating that the Web should be essentially frozen at its current feature set or even regressed to something much less capable, and that makes me sad.
If the web is to improve we need new features and strategies to mitigate the negative effects of the implementation of these features. Don’t throw the baby out with the bath water.
I write apps for myself, my family, and my friends. I put them on MY server and make them available to OUR devices. We should be able to notify ourselves whenever we want. Our devices should ask whether we want notifications or not to make sure, and we should be able to say yes. If a browser maker simply wants to avoid burdening the user, there should be a way to choose a default with blacklist or whitelist exceptions.
Instead, Apple (for example) says, "If you want to burden users by asking them if they want notifications, that would be very bad unless you first pay us for a dev account and keep paying and commit to using our own proprietary tech instead of using open web tech, because users aren't bothered by requests to allow notifications as long as they know it helps Apple. If you do, we will grant you the privilege of trying to persuade us that your app benefits us and not just yourself and your friends. Our App Store terms require you to show how your app isn't just a website (which we won't allow to send notifications) but serves Apple's needs in some way before we'll let you send notifications to yourself.
If it were really about serving the needs of users, iOS could allow users a choice between the default "browser that says NO" and "sides with users and power efficiency" and alternative browsers that, like App Store apps, show their contempt for users by letting them decide for themselves what they want.
Such as a user presses a button in order to enable push notifications.
Do you keep metrics on acceptance rates? How many of the notification prompts that you pop up are actually accepted? How much of the time are you just annoying your users?
We wanted to store pictures of where the user wants to go and cache map tiles offline. Mobile Safari has a limit of 50 MB. This is not enough for these use-cases.
Even more annoyingly, Apple deletes PWA's on iPhones after a few weeks. Our users often plan their trips months or many weeks in advance, and don't look at them for weeks at a time. By the time they go on the trip, they may be shocked to see that Apple has evicted their data from the local storage, just as they land somewhere where they no longer have access to 3G data!
I think Google's approach of providing virtually unlimited permanent storage is also probably not the best, but something in the middle might be better.
At the moment, it's clear that making PWA's capable is not an Apple-wide priority, even if the WebKit or Safari team may be in favor. We decided to avoid fighting it and build a native (React Native) app instead.