Push notifications are now supported cross-browser | Hacker News Reader

Push notifications are now supported cross-browser

web.dev

258 pointstwapi241 comments

> Push messages can be particularly useful for applications that need to deliver timely, relevant information to their users, such as news or sports apps, or for e-commerce websites that want to send users notifications about special offers or sales.

Sure, they have their uses… but web sites will send far more notifications than anyone wants to receive. People would enjoy a drinking fountain but get a fire hose.

I don’t even think about it. I just click “no” (and curse under my breath for even making me do that) and move on.

more like people want some eye drops of notifications, they get niagara falls.

everyone is competing for your attention.

I’ve never understood why the push notification permission doesn’t require a click to activate. Many other intrusive things (e.g. playing a video) do. Google have even gone down a long winded path of disabling the prompt for sites that have low acceptances rates which seems like a very over complicated solution.

Allowing it on page load has totally soured users on what could be a really useful tool. Sometimes I absolutely would like to receive notifications from a service without having to install an entire native app for it. Unfortunately that’s counter to the way Apple have implemented web push, requiring a Home Screen install before you’re able to use it.

On iOS push notifications are gated behind Web Clips[0]. You can only ask for notification permissions if the user has pinned your webapp to the homescreen. This seems like a perfect way to deal with all the spammy notification asks.

[0] What iOS calls a "progressive web app"

To me it’s not ideal. I can imagine wanting a notification from an app I don’t want to install to my home screen and I wish it were possible.

I know it’s not exactly what you have in mind, but with the App Library screen you can have an app installed yet not on any Home Screen. It’s just with the rest of your apps in there.

Apple is between a rock and a hard place with your request. What you want would require another way to delete a web app from your notification list. Right now they went with the simplest method: just use the way the native apps do it.

Actually Web Clips are an exception: you cannot have it in App Library. It's either on your home screen or deleted.

I feel like Firefox has done a good job moving the prompt to an unobtrusive part of the address bar and only really drawing attention to it after an interaction on a page occurred.

My impression is that Edge is just like iOS requiring you to "pin" a site somewhere (to bookmarks, to the start menu, to the desktop, to the taskbar, whatever) before prompting for notifications.

Whenever I get prompted to allow them from a website, my immediate thought is "why would they ever think I'd want this?"

Not all web apps spam notifications. I think we are all thinking of notifications in the context of what typical websites typically do but this is all dependent on what the web app/developer does (eg. if HN had a push notifications, wouldn't it be nice to know when you receive a reply to your comment? ... plus a "Notifications Settings" page to set what type of notifications HN can send, notifications about a certain topic or domain on the front page, etc?)

Uber Eats and Drizzly spam my notifications (I know Android has very detailed/overly complex IMO way of managing app notification channels) but because they are native apps we don't complain.

HNNotify.io (YC S23) anyone?

I love how detailed the notification management on Android can be

> Not all web apps spam notifications

Yes. I’ll bet there are many well-behaved web apps, with well-considered notifications and concise and simple options so that users get everything they want and little they don’t.

They are downed out by the firehose too.

firehose? as in other websites the user has allowed notifications for that are "bad" actors?

> if HN had a push notifications, wouldn't it be nice to know when you receive a reply to your comment?

Not via a push notification, no.

via what then?

Email would be my preference. That way, I can have it be autosorted and let my email client do any special processing I want, including notifications if that's desirable.

To be fair, focus mode now semi-effectively "autosorts" with preferred handling per cell in a matrix of source x modality.

I had to search for "focus mode" to learn what you were referring to, so forgive me if my understanding is incorrect. Isn't that a Win 11 thing? It looks like a kind of do-not-disturb mode?

How does that intersect with browser push notifications? Another advantage of email notifications is that the email notifications won't go away if I don't pay attention to them for a long while.

In any case, I don't use Windows except at work, where this wouldn't be an issue anyway.

There are very few websites that I love and might trust to not abuse notifications, and HN is probably one of them. Still, I only want an inbox or page showing unread messages that I can check at my own initiative rather than something that will pop-up or otherwise try to get my attention when I'm clearly choosing to look at or do something else. Only my wife and maybe my boss should be able to do that.

I would NOT want to get a notification if somebody replied to my comment on HN. I want a small, unoptrusive icon on HN that shows the exact number of replies that I haven't read and that I can click on when I have time.

There is far too much already that bings, bangs, jumps and try to get my attention.

They might know you probably won't want it, but they're hoping you'll click yes or accept without thinking, haha

I suspect that this is the real answer.

You can deny push notifications by default in your browser settings and never be prompted again. They can still be manually allowed on the sites where you actually want them. Same goes for location requests and other "site settings".

Annoying fact is that every major browser silently installs itself into the startup process when you enable any browser push notification on Windows (with Edge being enabled for this by default iirc).

If you're wondering why your only 2-year old Laptop is slowing down when you boot it up - this is why. Chances are that Edge, Firefox and/or Chrome all three decided that they should have the right to run a full instance of themselves when you boot up your PC because you enabled a notification for a site that doesn't ever send any to begin with.

Browsers are heavy things to boot up (not to mention that in potato RAM environments, they eat through RAM like there's no tomorrow). To be clear, browsers being heavy applications is fine, it's one application where people tolerate it because of how versatile the browser is, but it is extremely frustrating when it results in the computer taking 5 minutes to sign in, when all they needed to do was quickly revise a Word document.

The result is that people end up writing off perfectly serviceable laptops for something that is easily disabled in the task manager.

This sorta thing really should get a big warning popup that if you enable it, it probably will end up slowing down your PC. I can't exactly celebrate the fact that all three major browser engines now pester users into slowing down their PCs.

Otherwise, if your relatives/friends are complaining their laptop is slow (and you're the designated IT person), enjoy the free advice.

> every major browser silently installs itself into the startup process when you enable any browser push notification on Windows

Don’t they already do that for automatic background updates anyway?

Yes, but usually they have a smaller updater instead of the entire browser always having to run in the background. Guessing that’s what OP is complaining about.

The entire browser shouldn’t have to run in the background just to receive push messages. If a browser really does that, that’s pretty bad.

Firefox doesn't, they do this when you boot up the browser (always fun to boot up a computer that's been sitting unused for a few months and seeing the updater for a few seconds).

Chrome iirc has two update mechanisms, the first being Google Update which is a different application that isn't as resource heavy (and is also used to update applications like Google Earth) and the second being similar to the Firefox update mechanism, but it instead happens in the background while you're using the browser (with an orange exclamation mark when the update is ready to be installed to inform you that the browser needs to be restarted).

Safari updates always have been tied to updates to macOS/iOS, with all the benefits and issues that entails (no automatic updates whatsoever outside of OS updates).

The Chrome update detector mechanism also does another "fun" thing: it prevents use of your camera (and probably mic too) if it sees an update is available. But, obviously, it doesn't tell you that this is why your camera isn't working.

So, if you are trying to join an interview or exam and your camera and/or mic aren't working, check if you happen to have a small orange excalamtion point somewhere in your Chrome UI, chances are that's the reason.

This is quite interesting actually. I wonder if Google has been burnt by a zero-day allowing audio / video extraction in the past.

Not sure how widespread this is. I regularly screenshare with people and about 40% of the time the other person's Chrome browser has a big red or yellow Update Now button in the nav. No audio or video problems.

Safari updates are not tied to OS updates on the Mac

This is a Windows problem. I can cold boot and have Firefox up in 30 seconds in Linux.

+1 - I reboot my Mac once a quarter.

Why are people even rebooting?

The only time my windows computer reboots is when the power goes out.

(Also, I highly recommend staying away from windows, Microsoft is getting incredibly intrusive. If my work didn't use windows exclusively, I'd be on linux)

I hope you live in Buenos Aires where the power goes out weekly or else you are running a very insecure computer and are a threat to everyone around you. Unfortunately users like yourself forced Microsoft to require restarts for security updates which make the world a better place but really piss off the non-technical people.

Windows updates! Security updates every month. (Second Tuesday of each month.) It's lovely. Last time I checked the patch notes. Okay, nothing that affects me. Two days later I found my computer rebooted without any nagging or warning beforehand :|

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patch_Tuesday

Isn't 30 seconds a lot of time just to start a browser?

The first 26 is the OS getting to the desktop.

...of which 20 seconds is typing in the LUKS passphrase

I like the consistency though, had the same start up time on my Pentium III and Firefox 1.6 nearly 20 years ago /s

Frequently you find people complaining about browser performance have multiple extensions involved and they are suffering from “pluginitis”.

Pluginitis sufferers, however, have very little insight into their condition and frequently react violently when you tell them that your browser starts in just a few seconds.

Back in 1999 my relatives were browsing the web over dialup with 640x480 screens and frequently had more than 50% of the vertical screen area consumer by window chrome, browser buttons, and toolbar after toolbar installed by multiple (now forgotten) web sites such as Yahoo, Lycos, Hotmail, AOL, CNET, etc…. Oddly none of these people saw anything wrong with this.

No no no. If a plugin that blocks cookies and stuff like that manages to slow down a browser it means there's a big design error in that browser.

This has nothing to do with plugins. This is on browsers whose only installed extension is uBlock Origin. I'd hardly consider that pluginitis, since browsing the internet without an adblocker is tantamount to asking for malware these days.

uBlock Origin is a counterexample. It’s the only or very close to only browser extension that I think anyone should install.

They said: "cold boot and start the browser." That's two things, not just starting the browser.

They don't do this on Linux because there's no unified way to do it on Linux. It also happens on macOS if memory serves me right, but macOS makes it aggravating enough for people to usually disable it because of that (you can't do a silent application launch when logging in on macOS from what I can tell - sole exception being iTunesHelper on older versions - so any browser that sends push notifications opens a new window when you login to the computer, making it obvious and annoying).

> you can't do a silent application launch when logging in on macOS from what I can tell - sole exception being iTunesHelper on older versions

You absolutely can, there's ways for apps to launch without adding a dock icon or windows, this is typically done by menu bar apps, but can also be done by daemon-style services, or by apps meant to do global-style UIs (like a lot of the spotlight replacement apps)

There's no unified way to do it in Linux if you target people running bespoke i3 configs or dedicated environments (such as the Steam Deck game UI; the KDE environment will just work, obviously). With GNOME, KDE, and Mate, LXDE, and probably every other normal desktop environment, you can use XDG autostart to launch programs on login (https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/XDG_Autostart).

Even still, there are quick and easy configuration files available online for software like i3 (https://github.com/minad/i3-config/blob/master/autostart) to make them compatible with normal Linux setups.

I don't know why Linux versions of browsers don't do this, but it certainly isn't a technical limitation.

> I don't know why Linux versions of browsers don't do this, but it certainly isn't a technical limitation.

Shh! Don't tell them! They might start doing it.

An HTML renderer, in only 90,000,000,000 clock cycles? Verily I say, technology has come a long way.

Oh shush, and just go type "lynx" into your beloved green glowing terminal /jk

It's not just an HTML rendering engine. Heck, even a rendering engine is very complex these days.

Be ware that cold booting isn't actually cold booting anymore, but more like the suspend feature of old. You need to restart the computer (or pull the plug) to shut it down for real.

It's part of why laptops can't hold a charge anymore.

> Be ware that cold booting isn't actually cold booting anymore, but more like the suspend feature of old. You need to restart the computer (or pull the plug) to shut it down for real.

Not on Linux, which is what the parent poster is using. This "shut down means hibernate, you have to press restart to actually shut down" behavior is a Windows-only novelty.

Although you can configure Linux to do this, if you're feeling masochistic.

I configured my laptop to suspend on lid close. One day it didn't and overheated itself so badly it permanently damaged the screen.

What??

For years, I've been using my laptops connected to external monitors and I/O devices with the lid closed. I've never had any of them get anywhere near hot enough to damage the screen.

I wouldn't be so quick to blame that on Linux as much as it seems there was a hardware fault in the laptop.

I have a desktop with no swap configured. It can only cold boot when off. There is no way to hibernate, suspend, or whatever. Shutdown and long pressing the power button kills everything.

That's kinda scary. Linux assumes you have swap. If you do not, you may OOM with significant free memory because it needs it when swapping pages. Granted, not super common in a desktop setting, but still. Like a 64 Mb swap file is all you need to avoid this.

> I can cold boot and have Firefox up in 30 seconds in Linux.

You're lucky. That's not my experience at all. I stopped using Firefox in part because it's the only browser that takes more than 2 minutes to start up on my Linux boxes.

Lucky? All of my computers can launch Firefox within seconds, not minutes. That includes one from more than a decade ago. Have you installed Firefox on a spinning hard drive instead of an SSD?

I say you're lucky because I'm jealous. I wish FF worked as well for me. It used to, but something changed a couple of years back that broke it.

It's true that I don't use SSDs. It's also true that no other app (including other browsers) takes such an absurdly long time to start up, so I don't think the lack of an SSD is the issue.

Or, if it is, that means there's a larger problem with Firefox. You shouldn't have to run special hardware to run a browser.

In the same vein, I feel like persistent web workers need to be surfaced to the user more visibly than they are now, perhaps as a primary settings tab or something, and with periodic clean-up prompts from the browser (“foo.xyz has been running in the background for Y days without being used, would you like to stop it?”) because it seems to me that as things are currently at up, they’re gonna pile up indefinitely since there is no management to speak of. It also just seems kinda nutty that something that started running without my explicit permission can just hang around however long it wants to.

Why are you booting your laptop so often? Surely once a month or so to install updates is enough

Non-technical people turn their laptop off when they're not using it, because it eats up power and they often don't have the willingness to burn electricity bills on a device they don't fully understand how to use.

This isn't about me, this is about regular computer users, who make up by far the biggest crowd of people.

I generally turn things off when I'm not using them. Don't you?

This is only a Windows problem. I never need to reboot my Mac unless there's a major OS update.

What do I disable in the startup? I could not find anything mentioning Edge, firefox or chrome.

Nice, I do like it it had show quite useful for certain use cases.

Pro:

- notifications without needing a account (and e.g. giving them your mail)

- notifications when you use a web app (e.g. mail), I just don't want to install a app for quite a bunch of things, best it also works in situations where you simply can't install an app (e.g. company computer)

- less persistent/annoying then mail notifcation (through depends a bit on your OS notification manager)

Cons:

- less reliable

- less persistent then mail notification

- some sites try to push them on users, but then it's a pretty good indicator for which site not to use

Os/User Specific:

- I have seen cases where Windows displayed them quite intrusive and it was non obvious where they where coming from making it hard to disable them for a non tech versatile user.

Especially when it came to web mail clients, web messenger clients and some simple entertainment sites they have shown quite useful to me while the sites I visit normally don't try to push them onto users in an annoying way.

also pro: notifications on iOS for things that won't pass apple's walled garden

I have been waiting for this for a long time. I run a small forum and have maybe 10 core users who use it a lot. It is a recreation of a forgotten kind of old forum but with some modern features. I would like users to be able to opt-in to push notifications when someone replies to their post or when they get a private message. I get Patreon support that breaks even for server fees but otherwise it is a labor of love. I am currently using a Telegram bot to send users pushes but I was always hoping Safari would finally relent so I could use the real deal. Thank you, browser vendors. I agree with most of the comments here that push messages are generally evil but this is a huge boon for small niche websites like mine that don't have the resources to make a dedicated app.

This is the first legitimate excuse I've heard on the entire internet for browser push notifications.

I’d love to receive things like “product shipped” notifications. I know I can get emails but my inbox is just a firehose, would be great to move crap like that out of it.

There's been discussion for years over web notifications and this is the first you've heard that people like to get notified when people respond to them?

People have been putting up with large amounts of junk notifications for years. No one needs to wade through discussions to know how they'd feel when they're about to receive even more of them.

yes, everything about this. for websites that still use forums (yes they are out there!) push notifications for quoted replies and direct messages would be extremely helpful. i believe push notifications are one of the largest reasons why forums died out in days of early smartphones - not having that instant feedback of interaction caused their own interactions to diminish as well.

the need for dedicated apps on your smart phone is now almost unnecessary at this point, unless you're doing something extremely niche. what a win.

No, forums died because of a two-fold hit - Tapatalk bought out exclusivity rights for mobile access on most of the bigger forums, then did jack with it and made their phone app unusable.

The other death knell was Facebook getting on the phone train early, which meant that people moved to FB en-masse (which was already happening but got accelerated due to this.)

The only way this should work is by requesting a user input that explicitly comes from the user. No auto-popup. Right now push are so abused that I always disable it on every parent/friend/cat browser.

And the website should get no indication about the sate of the notification settings.

But then it wouldn't be a "push" notification. It's called "push" because the service is "pushing" the notification onto the user, the user has no agency in the matter aside from straight up blocking/disabling them.

No, it's called push because of push/pull architecture. You can subscribe to have notifications pushed, which is a way you, as a user, can control the behaviour.

You essentially repeated what I said, other than implying the user had a choice in getting notifications pushed to him to start with.

The difference is the Initiation. Push notifications have nothing to do with the platform enforcing push upon the user. Your comment made it seem like it was.

Most browser vendors already do, or will soon require a user gesture to initiate. That doesn't mean that abuse will disappear, but it should help.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Notificatio...

This fixes nothing.

Without this: you get a browser popup immediately on page load.

With this: you get a popup within the website, which will then trigger the browser popup if you miss the tiny (x).

As someone pointed out already, the only possible fix is for websites to somehow not know whether you've enabled them or not.

Yep, classic issue of usability vs abuse.

To solve abuse, the browser could pretend to comply by not returning error codes but doing nothing for the user.

However this would mean that websites with a legitimate use for the feature (say, an email client or whatever) would have degraded usability, kind of how Mac apps have to tell you to go to the system settings and allow them certain permissions.

At least within the website, we'll likely be able to use Ublock Origin, etc. to block a lot of 'em

I believe this is how it works on iOS. Only apps that have been added to the home screen by a user can request notifications.

It's a pity that the notification popups exist, they ruined notifications making them dead on arrival. It should be a browser setting UI somewhere so only motivated users can enable them. They can be useful. They should be an alternative to RSS. And they could remove a lot of bloat from app stores -- so many apps exist solely to capture the notifications channel

I wish browsers would have some kind of reputation system for push notifications.

If most other users find push messages from a site useful, then allow them. Otherwise, don't. Eg. Messages from ebay that say 'you won the auction, please pay now' might have the majority of users wanting.

Whereas messages from engadget letting you know that there are 112 new trending articles might see a far lower user interaction rate.

I would like the browser to have a setting "only allow push notifications from sites that the majority of other users interact with".

I'm pretty sure Chrome implements something like that.

If you want such an experience, just deny notifications by default (it's a browser setting) and click the little icon in the address bar if you run into a site that you do want notifications from if ghee prompt doesn't show up.

It can be so much better than this. It doesn't have to be an average of most other users. It's perfectly feasible to run user-level optimisation that runs by modeling user preferences and propensities to respond and then letting those models manage the notifications. That's what we've built at www.aampe.com

> These messages can be used to alert the user of new content or updates, remind them of upcoming events or deadlines, or provide other important information.

Or even information that's not important, I guess.

If a website has an update, well, sure they can "push" it; but why don't they just push it to their production server? It's obviously driven by the demands of advertisers, and any site that succeeds in pushing notifications my way is a site I won't be visiting again.

I can't recall a time, not even once, when I found pushnotifs in a browser useful or even desirable.

Even on my phone I block 99% of them because it's all just noise.

Most of the time the app is pushing them on you for engagement (youtube: LOOK NEW VIDEO!). But for important chats with important people, I sometimes want a notification when they send me a message.

If someone needs to contact me urgently, they should call me.

I never treat text communications as real-time communications, and I'm not about to start now.

Same here, but we are not everybody and the world needs to implement features for people other than us as well as those we want.

Yeah: I largely think phone calls are stupid, have been using text communication since I was a kid 30 years ago--on BBS systems originally!--and you have no hope of reaching me in a timely manner if you call me... but I'm not going to use that as a reason to make it harder for other people to use phone calls if they want them, even if I see no reason for synchronous communication to exist: you do you... but you also have to let me do me or you frankly don't deserve to be able to do you. "I don't find this useful" is only a reason to prevent other people from being able to have the feature if you are an authoritarian asshole, plain and simple :/. If you don't like aspects of feature, you know what? You should get to turn it off... and, it turns out, you can.

> on BBS systems originally!

I'll never forget being awoken because someone felt the need to page the SysOp at 2 AM on the Compaq laptop running my BBS in my closet.

With PWA you could have a VoIP service as a web app that notifies you if someone uses it to call you.

I don't even have it for chat. It's insane to me that you'd let your attention be stolen away that easily at any given moment (don't understand how people get deep hard work done when that's a constant risk).

Pretty much every platform with notifications supports a "do not disturb" mode for just such occasions.

It's simple really, it doesn't steal my attention away, I can just brush them off. Not everybody is the same.

Slack and similar are the only legit use case I can think of (much prefer it in a pinned tab than separate app)

I won't trust these proprietary Electron-based apps outside the browser sandbox either.

I have them for the email pinned tab...but that's basically it.

same here: email and chat are allowed, others are blocked.

I found recently you can add your Google account to Windows 10/11 and get integration with the calendar and email apps. Fairly useful.

If you have an IM application working in the browser, e.g. Element/Matrix.

For me it'd be useful if most service status pages had the option to subscribe to push notifications when a service is down.

On desktop, I kind of use reddit and Twitter notifications but nothing else.

The problem with notifications is the hyper competitive attention market on the web, which pushes the websites "optimize" notifications for eyeballs instead of UX.

Web notifications are dead as the web itself. Thankfully, Apple sensibly implemented the notifications through requiring the website be added on home screen.

Let's see if we end up with websites forcing people save it to the homescreen to "read the rest of the article".

As long as the web "content" is a bait and the content is the adds there wouldn't anything new on the web. Wast majority of the mobile usage is on Android and we haven't seen the golden age of mobile web apps, I don't think it will change with Apple embracing the notifications.

Could be good for non-kosher apps but the problem with that is the centralised nature of push notifications delivery. So if they want your web app killed, they can just kill it by not providing you the service.

Do you find them useful for apps? Email? Messaging apps? Calendar? Taxi apps notifying you when the taxi arrives? All of those apps can now be implemented as cross-platform web apps.

Sure. But we all know that even if the only reason it exists is because of useful applications that the marketing departments will abuse it, because to them 'push' translates into 'your undivided attention'. That's why every fifth website wants you to enable this - and then good luck if you want to disable it again.

The iOS implementation doesn't allow this. You have to add the app to your homescreen (i.e. "install" it) to allow it to even request permissions. This is actually for web apps.

> This is actually for web apps.

I'm aware of that. iOS is a proprietary OS and how it does things isn't all that relevant to me in this context. The web is a different matter and I've yet to see a use case of push notifications that served me. But I've seen 100's of websites that I have zero reason to see as useful applications trying to trick me into allowing them to use push notifications.

The context here is that Safari (incl. mobile safari) just added support. Every other browser has supported this for years. I agree that the implementation in Chrome that allows websites to request notification permissions on any page load is pretty annoying. But this UI is not a necessary part of this feature.

From an android POV, the benefit of this feature is that it allows you to install fully featured apps while keeping them in the web sandbox where you have fine-grained control over permissions.

> I agree that the implementation in Chrome that allows websites to request notification permissions on any page load is pretty annoying.

FF does pretty much the same thing.

With phone apps I sort of get it: you are already installing something and clearly have a long-term relationship with the provider of such an app and the app likely has functionality that you need badly enough that having the app alert you makes sense.

But for me the web is 'transient', even as the maker of a SPA I wouldn't dream of bugging my users outside of their own decision to come back to the site. All this needy software is - to me - just a source of irritation.

When I last checked a few years ago, self-hosted Discourse forums needed to self-publish an app to have push notifications on iOS. Hopefully that won't be the case anymore, it's a great community communications platform.

You can prevent them from asking you by turning off that feature in the browser settings. It’s the 2nd thing I do when I sit down in front of a computer for the first time. (First is install ublock-origin).

On iphone 1 in 10 000 knows how to do that.

I used to think this. Then I learned/realised how absolutely crappy the tooling available to those marketing departments is. The solution is for push to not be a manually run operation, it has to be run entirely by a kind of hybrid reinforcement learning system that can automatically manage the explore/exploit tradeoff in order to learn a person's preferences and then update its assessment as those preferences change over time.

And the second a single one of those apps sends me a promotional offer via a push notification I disable notifications wholesale, negating the entire benefit of this 'feature'. I don't want to have to run and maintain a spam filter for notifications.

Same. But there are plenty of apps that don't abuse their notification privileges (or allow you to disable the marketing notifications separately from the useful ones).

> I don't want to have to run and maintain a spam filter for notifications.

Maybe the OS should run and maintain that for you. Just as gmail automatically sorts your emails into different categories (and spam), maybe so the OS or the browser should sort notifications.

That would still need enforcement. Google and Apple would need to adopt a no-strikes policy and remove apps which send a marketing notification to the "your food has arrived" notification channel.

No strikes? So kick them off before they even do anything wrong?

One strike means one chance to screw up, zero strikes means...

No. Three strikes means you're out on the third strike, not the fourth.

That's usually when I uninstall these apps myself. Though on Android you can usually get the ad spam down by disabling it once in my experience.

That being said, it's been years since any apps have tried to push promotions onto me through notifications. I honestly don't know what app hellscape you and so many others online seem to live in; to me, notification ads have died a swift death somewhere around 2012.

That's silly. I don't know what kind of phone you have, but on my android phone you can specify which types of notifications you want to opt out of. It takes like 2 clicks to opt out of promotional messages but leave important notifications active.

Many apps don't bother separating their notifications by type.

> Do you find them useful for apps? Email?

No. I can check my email on my own time.

> Messaging apps?

Same. I can check my messages when I feel I have time to.

> Taxi apps notifying you when the taxi arrives?

Not really. Usually I can see when the taxi is arriving. (I almost never call a taxi anyways).

> Calendar?

Yes, that's the only case in my opinion when notifications are useful, otherwise I tend to forget meetings (not that all meetings are useful though).

> I can check my messages when I feel I have time to.

You don't see any utility in getting alerted when you get a text message? Most messaging apps allow you to mute threads, so silencing an active group chat is easy, but you don't have anybody in your life you want to be able to get through to you ASAP?

> Usually I can see when the taxi is arriving. (I almost never call a taxi anyways).

Sure, if you're waiting out in front of the building for a short time. Sometimes ride-sharing / taxi apps have a long wait. Most people appreciate being able to wait indoors, instead of sitting on the stoop for 20 minutes waiting for your ride to come. This is possible because the app will notify you when your driver is getting close enough that you should go outside.

Do I want those apps to be slow, sluggish, non-native feeling web apps?

Isn't that already the case, only with a thin wrapper to handle notifications?

I've seen many apps on iOS that just feel… weird. Especially the scroll. It's my understanding that many such apps are just web views.

Are you referring to web apps where scroll is hijacked by JS in some way? Because I don’t see how you can get more native than the default browser’s default scroll implementation.

The browsers default scroll implementation never feels like scrolling in native apps.

Even Safari? It's about as native as you can get. I've seen no evidence it uses different scroll logic than whatever "native" app. In fact many "native" apps that reinvented the wheel in their GUI framework have a decidedly worse scroll than many web apps.

I swear there was an article on the WebKit blog that detailed how the scrolling was different, but am not able to find it now.

Exactly. And if I have alternatives that are native, I use those or mostly just do without.

Anyone doing non-native apps on my phone will almost[0] never get money from me.

[0] There has to be the occasional exception, I suppose.

Yes, because they will have a harder time tracking you and taking control over your phone and its data.

Also web apps are not censored by the app store guidelines.

Are you seriously arguing that the web does a better job of respecting user privacy than desktop and mobile operating systems?

Yes that is what he's saying. It's also the truth and the only reason every social media forced you to use the app.

No, that's not why. It's because it's hard to make a performant Facebook webapp with all the bells and whistles.

Yes. Mobile and desktop apps have much more data leakage because they can store more data for longer and have much more APIs to use. A mobile app provides 100x more detailed data with more persistence than a website ever could.

This is well understood by the adtech industry and is why so many websites push apps in the first place.

Historically I think you are right but I'm not so sure it's still the case.

Do you think an iPhone with the tracking blocker engaged is still a richer source of data than the web app on an iPhone? Facebook claims that Apple's privacy protections cost them $10 billion of revenue the first year.

Yes. Apple's changes have reduced tracking in both modalities but webapps are far more constricted by Safari than native apps.

Yes.

When i close the webpage, that page is gone. It's not running in the background silently collecting data. With a properly configured browser (a few extensions, no third party cookies, or even separate containers), it doesn't have much data to gather in the first place.

> Also web apps are not censored by the app store guidelines.

Neither is any of the apps on custom F-Droid repos.

No, no, no, no, no and also... no.

and before you whine about taxis, it only takes a half second to open the app. If you need a ding on your phone you should probably walk home.

On my laptop? While I'm working? Hell no. No, no, no, and never.

I am a little (just a little) more tolerant on my phone.

Calendar is acceptable because I set each and every notification.

An taxi app might be acceptable because it has real world usage, but I imagine it would be abused pretty heavily with "first mile is free if you take a taxi tonight".

Email and messaging apps should not notify me. I will open them if/when I have the time and batch process them.

My ability to concentrate is already under enough assult and doesn't need to be harmed further, and while I am in favour of each person doing what they want, from a societal point of view we need way fewer distractions, not more.

I enable them for chat apps.

"I can't recall a time, not even once, when I found pushnotifs in a browser useful or even desirable."

Facts! It always feels intrusive. I have them blocked by default on mobile and desktop. However, I also have all notifications on my phone disabled as well as permanent do not disturb mode.

Property should not make demands for attention.

Yeah. I set my web browsers to auto-reject requests to enable notifications from web pages. Too many random news sites and things ask, and I never want notifications from any of the websites I visit. Web notifications are a hard no for me.

My thought would be using it for business software, not consumers. Like service desk software or anything that currently relies on app notifications or emails. This would be simpler.

You are not me, obviously -- because I do find them useful. Not as often as many sites would like me to, but Firefox won't keep interrupting me after the first time I visit a site.

Most of my phone notifications come in silently, and I won't tolerate spammy notifications, but I do want notifications for low priority/async operations so that I don't need to remember to check each app for anything actionable: the SRE book talks about "page", "ticket", and "log" messages; a noisy notification is a "page", a silent one is a "ticket", and if I want to see "log"-type messages then I can check the relevant app.

I do recall one time. But it was a small software project that exclusively benefited me and some friends and family and never got released to the general public.

I got flak because it couldn't be run on iOS with notifications. But everyone is in front of a computer all the time anyway, so they just used a desktop browser.

"Deliver timely and useful notifications to your users." - somehow I doubt the "useful" part. It's 99% just engagement noise to boost some PM bonus somewhere wasting precious time of users.

From the business side, all cases I remember why management decided to have some "native app" (even if its just a wrapped web app), is because they REALLY want notifications. (ignoring for a moment most users don't want them :-) )

So, does wthis mean we finally have the moment in time where PWAs start to be the best default choice instead of an appstore-app? I would appeciate that!

Too bad we're entering a time right now where the concept of "frontend engineering" evaporates in favor of Chat-UX :/

> This web feature is now available in all three browser engines!

I guess for practical purposes this is correct, but they should at least say "all major browser engines". There are others...

This is great news... Unfortunate as I used to be bullish on browser based push notifications, but in reality they were never working reliably on mobile devices.

I use a web API for my SMS gateway, and implemented push notifications via Firebase. It didn't matter whether I was using Fennec/Firefox, Chrome, or Vivaldi, I would always cease to be notified the moment the browser was killed off by my phone.

I eventually got sick of it and ported the logic over to call ntfy.sh instead. Not a single missed message since.

I've had no issue with Firebase on a personal project just pushing to my android. The big caveat is that the push doesn't wake the phone. So all notifications drop in when I click the screen on.

Am I the only one who has basically disabled all notifications at this point? Even if I turned them on for a select few apps I would actually potentially want them for (Slack, email, Instagram), there is so much noise in those apps and I can’t differentiate between what I actually want:

“send me Slack notifications if it seems urgent from my boss or team”

“send me email notifications if it’s from a top enterprise customer”

“send me Instagram DMs only if it’s from someone I’m interested in dating”

^ These are the kinds of notifications I would want to hit the push threshold but there’s no way to do that. Maybe a useful application of LLMs?

Nope, I have very few notifications allowed on my personal devices. Basically Messages/SMS and phone. And those are set to vibrate/visual, no sound.

Work laptop also has email and Slack visuals, no sound.

And I use Focus/Sleep to eliminate all (except wife/kid/parents) notifications from 9pm to 7am.

Edit - I can think of only 2-3 apps that send push notifications and they're mostly fitness related. The notifications are generally of the type "your workout was synced" and the only reason I leave these up is I use 3-4 apps and when they don't sync, I want to manually force a re-sync. None send random "we've updated a thing!" messages (and if they did, I disable the notifications).

I absolutely do NOT want random, unscheduled notifications that aren't directly related to something I did/am doing.

I don't understand how it's acceptable for apps like Uber or DoorDash to deliver to me an unprompted ad, pushed into my notifications center. It's always something like "10% off your order for the next day!" or "Try this new pass thing!".

Firstly, that's a guaranteed way for me to disable all notifications from the app, if not uninstall it. Secondly, how is that not a violation of some sort of Apple Developer Guideline? I wish they'd crack down on that sort of thing.

Absolutely unacceptable. Apps that abuse notifications to run ads get a one-star review and uninstalled. Lyft, Gig, Lime, Instagram, Migraine Buddy—dead to me.

And simply revoking permissions isn’t a solution; the core problem is that the app would even try to abuse its privileges. Imagine being content with someone trying to come though your door just because you’ve turned the deadbolt. Their behavior is still unacceptable.

One way I filter emails is by having multiple folders. I only get notified for the Inbox folder. Most other emails are filtered by title or email. I also hit the spam button too much, so I rarely get a bad notification.

Its become a noisy world.

Two of these don't need any machine learning; they just needs more information to be encoded in the notifications, and more comprehensive filtering to be built into the notification subsystem. Your second and third conditions just require the ability to build contact groups that get higher priority for notifications (and, of course, an indication within the notification of who the sender is).

The "urgent" part of the first is obviously somewhat more complicated, but the "from my boss or team" is also just a contact group. I don't use Slack, so I am unfamiliar with its specific capabilities, but if it gave the ability to mark a message as "urgent", that could be transferred through to the notification, and allow additional filtering on it. Alternatively, I suspect that it already allows (for whatever the Slack equivalent of the "server owner" is) for the creation of arbitrary channels; if your team created an "urgent issues" channel, the channel information could easily be encoded into notification metadata to allow filtering on.

I’ve left a few in banner mode, but nothing is configured to be intrusive. Only messages from my wife vibrate. Most apps aren’t even allows banners. But my philosophy is if it’s an emergency use a synchronous mode like calling me. If it’s not, I’ll tend to it as I can. For better or worse I check my phone often enough that asynchronous modes like messages or email or whatever get processed in short enough order.

Focus modes in iOS are helpful but I just found there’s no time when I need everything vibrating to tell me random information that I could poll.

I disabled all notifications but I selectively enabled them on some websites. For example I don't want to install discord or telegram apps, because they live in my browser just fine. But I can't really use them without notifications, that's essential feature. Right now I'm talking about desktop, but I'll be very happy to purge them from my iPhone.

Discord is interesting to see because I find the app experience way better. I just silence notifications/no push/no banner everything. I have to be tagged directly for it to alert me

> But I can't really use them without notifications, that's essential feature.

I use Discord extensively and exclusively within the browser, and I have push notifications disabled. I just keep it in a pinned tab, and whenever I have a notification it just puts a little red dot on the Discord tab's icon. I do aggressively mute channels and servers to keep it manageable, though.

I've turned all notifications (os, app, browser) off on all devices. They're just too distracting. It also helps me be more purposeful about how I interact with the machine.

> Am I the only one who has basically disabled all notifications at this point

Nope. I disable all notifications as well. The small handful of somewhat useful ones aren't worth the annoying and distracting cascade of completely worthless ones.

Notifications are the bane of my existence. Every app, desktop, mobile, website, professional tool, doesn't matter. They ALL have some kind of prompt. Ad, yes/no, another yes/no, are you sure, some pop-up, hey can I have your email, hey look over here, hey my setInterval() ran out. I feel like I live in a jungle of pop-ups and I, the user with a digital machete, must cut my way towards my computing goal.

Deactivation of this feature, however, is done differently on every browser.

There's definitely a valid use case when building PWA apps. The problem in previous versions was the impossibility to change the notification service, it is now possible through the `PushManager`.

This is a major deal for progressive web apps (PWAs) replacing native mobile development. Most native mobile apps have been able to be replaced by a PWA for at least the last 5 years but couldn't, on iOS, if they needed notifications. Now we can say bye to all the native, cross-platform frameworks and just use PWAs.

Lot of strong feelings here about push notifications :) I think it's worth pointing out that (1) there are many people out there who find push notifications useful or even desirable, and (2) push notifications don't need to suck. Most push notification are annoying nudges because tools that allow companies to send notifications only allow mindless mass blasts with maybe a bit of only-slightly-less-mindless segmentation scattered in. There are better ways to do it. I'm helping build one of those ways (aampe.com), but my point is that we should distinguish between the current state of the technology and the potential of the technology to meet a valid need.

Lots of people find email "useful or even desirable". Same with SMS, phone calls, mail/letters.

All have been abused by "marketing" to the point where they almost became or become useless. In some cases, workarounds were found so we can continue living our lives without spammers.

I suppose it's inevitable that push notifications are no different. But the argument is still unconvincing.

Why should we assume that the way SMS, phones, mail, notifications and other channels have been handled in the past is the way they must always be handled? I work with a lot of those marketers. It's not like they're sitting in front of Braze in a black top-hat, twirling a curly mustache with their fingers, and saying "heh heh heh, how I can annoy all of my users today?" They hate that there isn't a better way to reach people. There are better ways - I know because I'm building one of them and can see how it reaches people when they want, about what they want, and as frequently as they want, and how the engagement and purchase rates are way higher for those individualized messages than they are for dumb blast messages.

It's not inevitable that a tool with a glaring technical flaw must always have that technical flaw. Technical flaws can be fixed.

> Most push notification are annoying nudges because tools that allow companies to send notifications only allow mindless mass blasts

How hard is it to accept that for a lot of this stuff, there is literally nobody that wants to recieve it. It's fly-tipping your junk into millions of people's gardens in the hope that 0.001% of them see it and it reminds them of something they had meant to do already... The tech you are talking about almost certainly raises this to an amazing 0.0012%, by the looks of it it primarily does this by changing around the composition of the trash heap occasionally.

Until you invent telepathy, you will never be able to know who those vanishingly few people where recieving useless junk would remind them of something are

It feels like you're assuming a traditional marketing approach to "blasting" messages and hoping they stick. That's how most marketing tools work, but it's not how all marketing tools work, and I think it's a mistake to treat an implementation flaw as an indicator that a technology isn't actually desirable. It's not desirable in its current form. That doesn't mean it has to stay that way.

Great, right when this stopped being a commercial goal because we explained to the execs that we couldn't do it .

What a wonderful feature.

I'm gonna just quit and tell the boss to have GPT write the fuckin code for this. I'm sure that'll work.

Push notifications need to die.

How do you know when your favorite live streamers go live? Push notifications is the best solution to this problem.

I watch and read everything on my own time whenever I like it, why would I ever interrupt my flow? Every distraction ruins my day.

I turn off all push notifications everywhere that aren’t direct messages from a person I know, but even still, I think you’re missing the point entirely here. You can’t watch a livestream on your own time, it being live is the whole point.

Ah, right. Didn’t get much sleep today, sorry. Yes, that would be an exception.

>why would I ever interrupt my flow?

Because watching streams live is better than watching a vod.

I'm genuinely curious: What about push notifications (at least on desktop browsers) bothers you that much? I give permission to a few (like Gmail, etc.) and that's that; it makes my life less stressful knowing that I'll get alerted when it's time.

Hard disagree. I want push notifications for my messengers and forums. Calm down and just turn them off in your settings.

I have done this for like 10 times already.

No, its abusers should die. Grabbing the attention when necessary is very useful. Regulation and user control are paramount however, otherwise it's just ripe avenue for abuse.

I assume every service worker is constantly polling a server back-end, or, at least, has a long-running connection?

There are hundreds of service workers installed for me in Chrome (see: chrome://serviceworker-internals/)

I recall on iOS, Apple's infrastructure aggregates push notifications on the server-side, meaning an iPhone only has to maintain a connection to a single server for all push notifications.

Are there any similar initiatives for the Push API? Or is it simply not a priority, given the looser bandwidth/CPU constraints on desktop computers?

This isn't how it works at all; a server sends a message to a push service which then delivers it to the user agent. It is only once the user agent receives the message that it needs to start an installed service worker (if it isn't already running) to deliver the message in the form of the notification. (There's some interest in making it possible to send a notification directly via the push service without having the cost of starting a service worker, but that's future work.)

In the Safari case, this push service is essentially the same as is used for native apps, and it will do the same aggregation as you see for other notification types.

I never enable push notifications for any websites I visit, but I think, as a developer, it would be interesting to easily add push notifications for internal apps. i.e., stuff that one would use a Slack hook for, I'd rather have a homescreen web "app" that can send pushes natively (albeit via a third-party push broker) rather than having to either build your own native app or use a messaging platform.

I've been using push notifications for a while now. They can be very useful. I have a back end that send server events (PHP SSE) to my web app everytime a new there's a new entry on a DB, which triggers a push notification. That's how I did my sensor of presence [1]

1 - https://youtu.be/D4wimodtpKk

In my experience, web push notifications on Android do not show immediately (i.e. with high priority). They only show when your phone wakes. Does anyone know of a workaround for this?

This is a step in the right direction.

Now that they are standardized across all modern browsers, standards around their governance will follow.

How is that good? New ways to spam us?

We need modern Pop Ups!!

Oh boy, do I have exciting news for you! https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/popover.html

Your username does check out here.

I have an app that makes very valid use of push notifications on the web. This should be celebrated because now you can do more without diving into the shitty apple app store with it's 100 dollar a year fee.

With more and more update recently, it's seems that Apple doesn't want to get another EU compliance rule of default browser?

you can turn off these requests for all sites in:

chrome://settings/content/notifications

Just make notification manager where I can see them all.

Like RSS READER.

Thanks for contributing to making the web a worse place, little by little, brick by brick. It's still barely usable but I trust that one day you and your peers will manage to make it unusable at all.

No, thank you

Apple supports them now. Everyone else has been doing it for years.

The first thing I do on any browser is to completely disable notifications, on PC and mobile both. There are zero legitimate use cases for this. If you need notifications, install an app.

Why should every site be an app wrapper just to be able to notify you? The abuse is a serious problem that needs to be solved but I don't see more apps being the solution.

in the articles author says:

> Safari for iOS and iPadOS supports push notifications as of version 16.4, but only for apps that were added to the Home Screen. Apple calls these Home Screen web apps

This should be a good enough way to prevent abuse

on desktop they are maybe not that useful but for mobile they can be occasionally useful:

- ordering some food or pizza when you are just for short time in different city / country - I don't want to install some dedicated app that I won't use anymore in a week or two.

- renting e-scooter when on vacation - again each country usually has different such e-bike providers.

- local taxi app - uber / gojek /grab is not in every country

Why an app? An app has much more control over your phone without your knowledge. And this is also about desktop browsers, where there's less apps.

I loathe notifications and turn 99% of them off, but there are use cases for this and I'm glad that Apple has finally caved in to better support web apps and not only their walled garden.

> An app has much more control over your phone without your knowledge.

On iOS it doesn't. Apps are heavily sandboxed and most interactions outside the app require explicit user permission.

I have enabled notifications for only 2 things: outlook webmail and Microsoft Teams on my professional laptop (Linux user). I don't need those to be applications (teams app is a website anyway).

I am glad the option exist and I am also happy I can choose to ignore that option for 99.99% of the websites I visit.

Bottom line: choice is good as long as it is opt-in and not opt-out.

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