Comment by mapt
1 day ago
The entire idea of push notifications on browsers was obviously toxic from the start, especially the privileged status "Do you want to enable notifications?" popups had.
I think the idea comes from the 2010's hype about Phone-Ifying The Desktop. Someone clearly thought they were recreating the Google Reader / RSS ecosystem (Mozilla had RSS in the browser in a flop)... but everyone else was just enthusiastic about dark patterns that were viable in mobile apps that didn't exist in a desktop browser.
I use this feature all the time and I love it. Not having to install dozens of apps just to see the occasional notification is a dream come true.
The way it's trivial for browsers to fake OS notifications on some platforms is a clear design flaw, though. I get the need for it (PWAs and such) but unless the website sending a notification is a PWA, there's no need for a notification to be that ambiguous.
The current system, where Chrome (the only browser that matters) collects information about websites and only shows the permission popup on some websites has mostly killed useful notification support for a lot of websites.
I can think of exactly two use cases for web browser push notifications:
- Web-based email
- Web-based chat
That’s it. Every other use case seems to be solving a “them” problem (how do we increase engagement?) and not a “me” problem.
Even if I wanted to hear about updates from a website (and I never do), I could sign up for emails. And If I don’t trust a website with my email, I certainly don’t trust them with sending me push notifications.
In fact, let me take chat apps off that list, because if I don’t have the webapp open in a browser window, the chat app should have the option to just email me about someone trying to message me (and ideally, letting the other party know I’m unavailable and letting them choose whether to send me the email.) So no, really just email and that’s it.
I’m super curious what your use cases are if you use web-based push notifications “all the time”.
Youtube uses it well. You can get notifications when people upload videos or to recommend you suggested videos you may like. Sure engagement increases, but that is because I'm watching videos that I find entertaining. It's a win win for YouTube and the users.
3 replies →
I think notifications came about as part of Progressive Web Apps (PWA).
IMO random websites prompting to access your location data is far more problematic
The biggest problem there is that several browsers don't want to remember your response of "No" for more than one day. They want you to be constantly tracked. I'd like to be able to tell all browsers, never track my location or send me a notification from any website but that's not what they want. Orion by Kagi is a breath of fresh air in this department.
DocuSign tracks your location when you sign a document unless you disable it in the browser. Learned that a few years ago.
Its a progressive webapp feature and would be a necessary tool tobescape Apple and Google stores and hardwarw lockin. Like all tech, hindsight is 20/20 with malicious actors.