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Comment by oh_sigh | Hacker News Reader

> If people care enough for notifications, they will find a way to enable them. If they don't, no harm done.

If people don't care enough about notifications, they will find a way to disable them. If they don't, no harm done.

I appreciate that you have your own preference on this matter, but do you really think that most people don't like notifications? Most people want them.

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>I appreciate that you have your own preference on this matter, but do you really think that most people don't like notifications? Most people want them.

A source for that?

What's a fact is that all people didn't had them for the first 15+ years of the web, and I've never heard people complaining about that lack -- whereas people always asked for faster loading websites, less popups, no auto-play for sound and videos, ability to turn off ads, etc.

Notifications are necessary for many applications, they are not for traditional websites although sadly that doesn't stop them from requesting permission. Imo the notification feature really should require at least https, like many other intended-for-applications browser features like service worker and location. On mobile you could replace most native apps (twitter, facebook, mail etc) with a web app if they supported notifications and save gigabytes of space for stuff that actually needs to be native.

People didn't have a lot of stuff for X+ years of the web. I'm not really sure how that is an argument for or against something.

None of the desires you list are associated with notifications.

Most people don't. Most people are annoyed by their browser bugging them to make decisions for things they don't care about or need. Notifications from browsers or web pages is clearly a poor fit, UX wise.

Lack of notifications rules out an entire class of potential applications.

We can bicker about implementation but saying "web apps don't need notifications" is as nonsensical as saying "desktop apps don't need notifications".

> Most people want them.

Source?

In this thread, most people calling for deny to be the default state for notifications are being downvoted, while people defending the default of "ask" are being upvoted. Do you consider this sufficient evidence?

Absolutely not. This is an echo chamber of people interested in technology and startups. To extrapolate out to the broader entire web user audience is a massive logical fallacy. I would hope that's obvious to almost anyone.

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