Comment by HelixEndeavor
5 years ago
Developers stubbornly refusing to utilize the tools provided by the operating system because they think they can do it better (90% of the time they can't) is one of my greatest pet peeves.
You should ONLY ever use your own engine for things like notifications if the particular OS doesn't support them (pre-10 Windows)
I believe that in this case it's simply convenience/laziness to have a single notifications codebase across both operating systems? That and Windows didn't have native notifications when it was first developed. Not that it excuses a big chat application from MS behaving this way, just saying that they probably didn't deliberately choose to re-implement notifications just because they didn't like the OS ones.
Windows has had balloon notifications since Windows 2000. These show up as toast notifications by default in Windows 10, so compliant applications would be transitioned automatically.
Some software also presents that in the settings as the choice between "native notifications, which don't have as many features" and "custom notifications, which have all bells and whistles". And the default of course is the one with more features, not the one that respects your settings. I think Mattermost was where I've seen that distinction.
This is what happens in an Electron world. Lots of experts around to make some JS+CSS notification boxes because they keep reinventing those for every SPA anyway, but.. integrate with the native system notifications? They don't even know how Electron works so how would they begin to do any of that.
overall I agree, but tbh I'm quite happy for Telegram Desktop having its own notifications - the system ones in my Ubuntu Gnome (went through a few LTS upgrades, but not heavily customized) are really messed up, especially when Firefox sends something
AFAIK, every native app can subscribe and read all notifications, at least on Windows. So, sending notifications to the OS is a huge privacy issue.