Comment by manwe150
14 hours ago
That’s likely not quite the reason. It is to make you have to pause to think if this is the action you want to take.
On the flip side, many websites ask if I want to allow notifications. I almost never do. I was looking at settings recently and surprised how often I’d clicked yes by accident (maybe about 5% false click rate?)
>On the flip side, many websites ask if I want to allow notifications
One of the first things I disable on any new Firefox setup. I want zero notifications from websites (or in general, one of the objective improvements of Windows 10 over Windows 7 is that you can just disable notifications entirely, while disabling balloon alerts in Windows 7 was a huge battle that never fully worked)
but the damage of notifications is almost zero compared to keylogger IMHO
Right, that’s why you get a simpler yes/no dialog for notifications, and a conplex “navigate to this settings pane and click a separate button” flow for a keylogger
I’d like a dialog where you are simply asked to repeat a sentence like «yes, record my screen» or «yes, record what I type» into a text field to approve. Straightforward but still makes you think.
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Notification requests add to decision fatigue, which can lead to bad things.
Depends on what you allow and what your level of sophistication is.
My mother recently had "There are antivirus notifications taking over half the screen, do I need to click on them and renew Norton?"
She'd been somewhere and done something that had allowed an unscrupulous site to flood her with alerts directing her to give payment information to a scam site pretending to be antivirus renewal.
When I finally got over there (she doesn't live on the same continent) I went in and disabled notifications on all of her installed browsers.
As far as I'm concerned the whole 'let this website notify you' feature is an antipattern and yet another example of browser overreach.
> 'let this website notify you' feature is an antipattern and yet another example of browser overreach.
Yes and no. Prompting for it modally the way they do now is for sure wild, but for some webapps (e.g. Slack) it makes plenty of sense. I think Firefox used to have a UI they used for some things where they'd inject a non-modal bar with a couple of buttons inside the content area. This sounds like the right type of UI, maybe at the bottom of the viewport.
> As far as I'm concerned the whole 'let this website notify you' feature is an antipattern and yet another example of browser overreach.
It's a symptom of the whole "we converted our document platform into an application platform" debacle that typifies the modern web.
Notifications make no sense for the majority of websites, but if you use, say, a web-based email client, then you probably do want them.