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Comment by jmull | Hacker News Reader

> Let web apps programmatically trigger the Add to Dock flow, since the Share icon and the File menu install ways are hard to discover.

Please, for the sake of all decency, no! We do NOT need new ways for web sites to badger users.

(Sorry to focus on this one thing. This was a great and informative article, with 99% good ideas. I just had a visceral reaction to the idea of yet more ways for sites to harass me as a user.)

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This one isn't particularly abused. It's already available in Chrome and the number of sites that leverage it at all is vanishingly small. No real abuse from it - so far at least.

It does offer a much better user experience than "go search out these obscure menu methods".

Safari might do well offering a "don't badger me" option that just shuts all page based prompts and requests.

It wouldn't be a "new" way to badger users, because developers can currently badger users to install a native app. A Smart App Banner for installable web apps would be no worse than what Apple currently offers, a Smart App Banner exclusively for native apps, and I think those banners are just fine.

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/webkit/promoting_a...

> Smart App Banners vastly improve users’ browsing experience compared to other promotional methods. In iOS, Smart App Banners provide a consistent look and feel that users come to recognize. They trust that tapping the banner will take them to the App Store and not a third-party advertisement. They appreciate unobtrusive banners at the top of a webpage, instead of a full screen that interrupts their experience with the web content. And with a large and prominent Close button, a banner is easy to dismiss. When the user returns to the webpage, the banner doesn’t reappear.

Note that "Add to Dock" installable web apps already do have a Smart App Banner on the new macOS 14 Sonoma, but only when you already have the web app installed. (It's exactly like the Smart App Banner for native apps, but, for web apps, it only works with the "Open" button, not with the "Install" button.)

It's just not good UX to programmatically trigger the dock flow either.

But it does signal an important aspect about the current iteration: the share icon hides way too many choices that don't make any real sense for being under the share icon. This is something Apple should absolutely work on ASAP because it's becoming a bloated list. Seriously, why is find under the share icon? How absurd this has gone on for THIS long.

Share became Export so slowly I never even realized it.

Seriously, I'm already sick of "let me send you desktop notifications!" popups.

All browsers should have a setting that just tells all sites that notifications are enabled but never actually shows them until the user opts in so sites can't present those stupid prompts.

And why attempt to start sending notifications if it is the first time I have visited a site? I don't know the site, I haven't had time to read any of the content. Why would I possibly want to get notifications from a site I know nothing about? Maybe if I visit it several more times in the next week or two, then ask me if I want notifications if you feel you must. Anything else is just annoying and sort of mindless.

Sites likely do this to prey on "yes-click syndrome" where people just blindly mow through prompts to get to whatever it was they came for more quickly.

To turn off notification popups, in Safari...

1. Go to Settings

2. Open Websites tab

3. Select General -> Notifications

4. Untick "Allow websites to ask for permission to send notifications"

No more notification popups!

Unfortunately many websites send a JS-based notification which can't be blocked before prompting you for the system one. I think the idea is that that can spam the JS one as much as they want, but once you say no to the system one, that's it, they can't prompt with it again.

Yeah, I hate that. It's usually easy to spot, so I click "allow" on the JS notification and then block the real one when it pops up.

Today I learned, thanks!

I kind of wish there was a "Block and notify" option though, like there is with pop-up windows. One reason is that sometimes you might actually want to enable them, but it seems like there's no indication of the attempt at all.

But even for crappy websites, it would also be nice to know that they tried because it's one of the things that help to weed them out more easily.

I'm sort of resistant to that, because despite never having actually wanted to do so I keep thinking that there might someday be a site I'll want to allow notifications on...

+1. I've never needed that crap and can assume the vast huge majority of users won't either. The Notifications Api only exists for websites as marketing channels and spamming. Think of email spam but one that's right in your face.

Firefox solved this years ago. The only indication is a little icon in the address bar.

https://blog.mozilla.org/futurereleases/2019/11/04/restricti...

The nasty thing that some sites will prompt you via a notification within the page. They want people who decline to do it there because it means they can try to bother you about it later (the request to the browser to show notifications was never made in this case).

The strategy with those is to accept the prompt in the page and then deny it at the browser level, but that's not something many people would know.

There are so many developers that seem to have a hard time with the notion that, just because they wouldn't abuse a feature, doesn't mean someone else wouldn't.

I was actually against web push notifications as a feature precisely because I knew it'd just create a thousand push notification pop-ups on the web.

And behold.

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