Reducing Abusive Notification Content | Hacker News Reader

Reducing Abusive Notification Content

blog.chromium.org

33 pointsheadalgorithm43 comments

> Although notifications on the web are useful for a variety of applications

The notification nag modal has been a scourge since it was introduced. They admit as much here:

> Abusive notification prompts are one of the top user complaints we receive about Chrome.

These always should have been opt in or user-initiated only, never should have been allowable as a modal prompt when landing on a page.

Absolutely - I auto deny reflexively, and probably miss out on notifcations I want.

It's weird - cookie popups (I can browse incognito or clear cookies or use an extension to control my own cookies) and the notification popup I found similarly annoying.

Just let me browse and control my browsing on my own terms. In the website text it can ask that I go into a notifications whitelist panel and add a url that can send notifications, or click on an element that triggers the pop-up etc.

Similarly, we keep on hearing these headlines about someone not having the right cookie popups or enough of them etc. I wish those would go away as well. The place to control cookies is with the user. I'm not sure disabling cookies even hides my activities from a site (obviously it doesn't).

Yeah cookies are a red herring and I'm disappointed that the result of GRPD has been to add a nag modal to ask for cookie permission - correct behavior should be for the browser to be configured to auto-accept or auto-reject cookies based on user preference. Having each site ask for permission is just as annoying as advertising popups where in the 00s.

This seems like an obvious fix. Mobile browsers already have solutions where prompts/sounds/playback can only be initiated inside a click/interaction handler.

I don't see why it can't be the same here.

Desktop browsers have it, too, at least for opening popup windows and unmuting audio. Site owners work around it by coaxing the user into clicking a button that opens the prompt, with a label that says it does something else.

The popup window situation has gotten so bad that even websites that legitimately want popups have stopped using them, because it's such a PITA to get them to reliably open.

I played around with this previously. For playing audio the "button" can be a invisible div that takes up the entire page and interacting with it can be not only clicking but simply moving the mouse over the div.

Here's another idea for this: how about a "stealth deny" button that will tell the website that you allowed notifications, but not actually show them to you?

Would that actually work? Don't notifications cause your browser to communicate regularly, in the background, with the site?

Would you actually want your browser doing that?

If you have that site open in a tab, then it could do that anyway, and if you don't, then it could just stop talking to that site and pretend your computer is off until you visit it again.

> Would that actually work? Don't notifications cause your browser to communicate regularly, in the background, with the site?

no, communication is done through a push provider.

The technical answer is a little messy. Lying to the Notifications API doesn't make the browser itself do anything on the network, but it'll make the site think the user has opted into features that require network activity, so you'll incur all the technical costs of the site trying to send you notifications, even though you're not actually seeing the notifications.

Not regularly, but during the initial permissions prompt the website is told whether you've accepted it or not. Granted, I've personally never seen a website that outright refuses to work with notifications disabled so I'm not sure whether there's value in this.

> Granted, I've personally never seen a website that outright refuses to work with notifications disabled so I'm not sure whether there's value in this.

I do. I encountered a few sites that outright refused to function with the notification disabled. Only way for those site to work is to accept the notification. There are value to have a silent notification or fake acceptance.

> I've personally never seen a website that outright refuses to work with notifications disabled

The example in the linked article is a site that covers the page with a gray box and an arrow pointing at the notification request, labeled "Click ‘Allow’ to enter!"

Does anyone find notifications to actually be useful? I don't think I have them enabled for any site.

Yes, in very, very narrow cases:

- Gmail - Calendar - Online support chats where I get a notification when an agent becomes available/responds so I don't forget about the tab - A custom tool I wrote for myself (web notifications are the easiest way to get push notifications onto your phone without having to go through the overhead of full app development)

I bet there are some people who genuinely like the idea of a news site pushing them the latest news. I doubt they outweigh the number who accidentally enable those notifications and then can't turn them off, but I haven't seen user studies and I could be wrong; average users often have habits that seem weird to me.

I have, however, also seen what really abusive notifications can do: A friend enabled notifications from a shady site or the ads served on the shady site (because users don't understand dialogs and end up clicking a random button, so ask them often enough and one of the clicks will land on "yes"), and now their Chromebook was telling them that they have a virus and need to {install a malicious extension,give the scammer money,etc.}. Since then, disabling notifications is on my mental "browser hardening for when I set up a browser for inexperienced users" checklist.

I'd wholeheartedly support blocking the notification dialog for all sites, limiting notifications to a barely-noticeable icon that the user needs to actively click. Much harder to convince a user to take an action than to convince a user to click a random button to get rid of a dialog that's getting in their face.

Also, an easy browser-controlled way to unsubscribe from notifications, and enforcement based on the rates of a) people clicking "no" in the permission dialog, b) unsubscribe rates. If the metrics show that your users aren't happy with your notifications, no more notifications for you.

I like them for Trello, which is our project communication system at work. Trello has native apps, but they’re in poor condition. Standard browser sessions with notifications seem to work better.

I appreciate notifications for web-based email and calendar applications.

The lack of them in MobileSafari discourages any legitimate developers from building on them, imho.

I use them for email and chat websites.

I've never turned them on for news types sites though.

I have them on for chat apps that I run in the browser because their native client is Electron-based.

It is useful, but in 1 every 300 sites I visit, so the SNR is not good indeed.

I use the Slack website instead of the native app because I don't really see a need for having more native apps that are just glorified website wrappers, and they're useful there.

Gitlab pipeline succeeded notification is the only one I find helpful.

I have them enabled for a few chat and email interfaces that I use in the browser only.

I use them for my GitLab pipelines

Here’s a better idea. Remove the notification feature entirely. Don’t disable it. Remove it. Its loss would improve the internet.

I think this is overly broad. If I have a chat webapp open, I would like a notification rather than having to manually poll it for new messages or missing messages.

A plugin works for notification.

It could be a useful feature, but marketing ruined it, just like everything else web related.

No it's useful, however it's has been incredibly abused by bad actors, marketing corps, spammers and co who sell their notification channels to third parties and is basically used as an AD pop up.

I use a web based phone services so I do like it in some contexts. Inbound calls ring up more visibly this way.

It really bothers me to see the very serious and very subjective word “abusive” used objectively here like I’m expected to agree with 100% of Google’s criteria.

I think all these systems end up being abused and users just stop paying attention to them. The reason is, google doesn't have a vested interest in notifications being great. Facebook didn't either when they had their platform, so it was full of spam and ended up being useless. I think the same is happening with browser notifications. Mobile notifications seem to be going on the same path of saturating.

What i find more useful is to have the notifications in-page. If the user wants to keep a tab open, they ll hear a beep when something interesting happens.

Now, if only we could do something about the fake "allow notifications" pop-up that websites throw up these days…

If you can't live with Javascript disabled by default, disallow connections to Onesignal.

That will block a lot of them.

(YC '11)

there should just be a plugin that tracks bad behavior and completely blackholes any sites that partake in it.

I disabled js on my mobile browser. Life is much better

Why are web notifications even a thing?

for the same reason SPAs are a thing, because ppl are jealous of mobile apps.

What is an SPA?

Single Page App, a webapp built around a single "page" but changed around with a load of Javascript. Often uses #fragments in place of actual URLs within the app, which can mess with normal navigation.

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