Comment by KevinGlass
6 months ago
I honestly think desktop notifications in their current form are one of the worst features of the modern web. Sure it's nice to get an email alert but on my experience there's probably a thousand confused old people getting spammed for each person that intentionally enabled it.
What's worse is they look like native OS alerts (on Windows) so when one says "SECURYIRT ALERT!! CALL NOW" it's that much more effective at getting people on the phone with scammers.
So many sites ask for permission to send notifications that have zero reason to do so. Why would I want push notifications from a shopping or news site?
Honestly, push notifications from a news site arguably is one of the few sites that I see having a reason to send push notifications.
Communication platforms; messaging apps (Slack, Discord etc); email sites (gmail and co.) also make sense. Financial platforms (banks, Stripe etc)
Once you start getting out of these two categories, then yeah, it gets silly. No way should an airline website even be allowed to ask to send push notifications.
Google does have a way for Chrome users to not show the notification window (https://yespo.io/blog/google-chrome-will-now-block-abusive-b...) by default (https://support.google.com/webtools/answer/9799829?hl=en) but I really wish that this was flipped, so that Google would first need to approve sites to use notifications, similar to the Public Suffix List.
If I trusted airlines to only send me notifications about gate changes, failed payments, delayed flights, maaaybe low prices on route-date combinations I previously expressed interest in, I'd give them notification permissions. I definitely don't trust them to do that, though.
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See, that's just the point. You see a need for that. I'd never enable push notifications from a news site, I don't need to know NOW that some pupil shot 17 teachers and pupils in the elementary school around the corner. There is nothing I could do anyway. I'm extremely unlikely to enable notifications from async messaging because, you know, they are async. If it's urgent, come over to my desk or use your phone to call me.
Financial data or travel info is something I'm actively watching, when I travel, just like car traffic. Otherwise, why would I need to know? That's a good question to ask anyway anytime you come across an inbox. I have been in management really long now and designing your information flow strategically is crucial to being effective.
> No way should an airline website even be allowed to ask to send push notifications.
Your flight is delayed/now boarding/etc?
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Same reason you subscribe to their newsletters. To get discounts.
I don't understand why people would want that, but neither do I understand the people who actually enter their email address in those "subscribe to my newsletter" popovers.
I wonder how many people's browsers get push notifications from Temu, or Amazon.
I feel like the web would be a better place if "allow notifications" popups were only allowed for PWAs the user already installed. I.e. they have to manually interact with the page and then click the prompt acknowledging they want to install the site as an application on their computer before the site can start popping up windows from the browser asking for notification permissions.
It's not that there are 0 use cases where it could possibly be convenient to get notifications from a plain site but, like you said with the email example, 95% of the legitimate use cases are probably better modeled as an app anyways.
What's "progressive" about installing software?
It's always saddened me that people failed to understand the web platform, and never more so than today when that platform could be on the verge of extinction.
Young people don't remember this: in the 1990s if a big corporation wanted to make a 1-line change to an application deployed to a fleet of desktops they'd have to update every single machine and to do so they'd probably have to hire at least 1 FTE and probably more for installer engineering and other makework.
With the web it is often
on the server and you're done!
As it is I can find web sites with search, links from other sites, bookmarks and history. If you "install" applications you just clutter up your desktop with 300 icons for applications you don't really use which makes it hard to find the 2-3 that you really use.
It's progressive because you're progressing the permissions and features the website can access beyond those of a normal page. It has nothing to do with progressing the web to 90s style app installation and the update mechanism is nothing like that either, it functions as a locally cached webpage not as something you need an SCCM push to load a new binary or something. PWAs do not have to be accessed through desktop icons either - just launch them through the browser's interface as you seem to prefer. If you've ever seen a machine with a default Chrome install then it had about a half dozen PWAs installed without any such desktop shortcuts.
The best uses I've gotten out of PWAs are on my Linux machine where there either isn't a native app or I wouldn't trust installing one from the manufacturer if there was. At the same time I don't want random websites to have access to the permissions these apps would need so I load the PWA version of the website and now I've got the ideal island of something served as a website but with the elevated permissions it needs.
Instead of desktop notifications web apps should use pinned tabs and show a badge in the tab header.
That’s more a browser implementation issue though. Browser could offer that as a choice for how to handle notifications, on a per-website basis.