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Comment by morepork | Hacker News Reader

Push notifications are useful in browsers in all the same places they are useful in mobile apps. Note that browser push notifications also work on mobile, so you don't need to install an app to get real time alerts.

For example:

- Sites with chat can send you messages even if you don't have the tab open (or even browser in some cases)

- Online game e.g. board game or chess can push to you when it's your move.

- Home alerts, e.g. that your garage door has been opened

Sure there are a lot of spammy notifications, e.g. sales alerts, news items, etc. that most people probably don't want, but there are genuinely useful use cases.

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I turn off/no to push notifications on every app that has ever asked for it, except Messaging and Calendar. Nothing else I've ever installed has warranted more than a little red notification dot on the icon.

Why cannot it be automatically "no" for all push notifications? A website should not even be allowed to ask me.

MS Teams already gives me a lot of push notifications during my work day, and if the browsers starts to do this, I will be overwhelmed with beeping nag-notifications.

Computer clutter is a distraction and lowers productivity.

Firefox lets you do this for each permissions category (notifications, camera/mic access, etc).

IIRC by default Firefox doesn't prompt you when sites request to send you notifications. But it's possible, i just set some configuration a long time ago and forgot about it

You can set that up in browsers as well (blocking * domains from sending push notifications).

This is the way. In addition to those, I have a silent e-mail count badge for Gmail and WSJ news alerts (because they are tangentially relevant for my job)

> Note that browser push notifications also work on mobile, so you don't need to install an app to get real time alerts.

Push notifications in Safari are only supported on desktop for now.

That’s true. Apple just offered guidance that they are coming sometime in 2023 for iOS.

Yes, but they finally have announced support for mobile is coming. That’s the context of this link in my mind.

I can't belive it's 2022 and we are still waiting for this

I would say that I can’t believe that in 2023 I’m going to have yet another dialog to dismiss by denial on websites on my phone, but I would be lying.

Just set the default to no.

/sigh

> chess

Perfect for lichess when my mind wonders and I switch to something else.

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