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Comment by city41 | Hacker News Reader

The push API is supported by every major browser except Safari. Just because you find them annoying is no excuse for not supporting them.

If by chance Apple agrees with your stance, a Safari config that disables them is the proper solution, not dragging their feet.

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It's a pure loss for non-geek users. It should be disabled—no dialog allowed, even—by default, if the feature's gonna exist. That hitting "allow" on a pane that pops up on a site—something users are conditioned to do without thinking by all kinds of shitty but extremely common web patterns—affects something outside the current site's browser window is unexpected and unwanted by normal users. Cases where it's easy for sites to affect the behavior of a machine, or of the browser, outside the current session on that site, have historically been a big problem for non-geeks, and this is no exception.

That sounds pretty reasonable to me. But that still doesn't excuse Apple not implementing it. Apple doesn't implement features like this because they want to maintain app store sales. They do this for them, not their customers.

I think if Apple really really wanted to implement it if not for the risk to app sales, they'd have it on desktop Safari, at least. As it is, I just think they don't want to implement it, App Store or no.

From observing non-geeks use the "feature", I think that's the right call regardless. It needs to go back to the drawing board, or be scrapped. In general, anything that expands the reach & capabilities of websites should be treated with a ton of suspicion, as a likely vulnerability vector (leaking tracking info; social engineering/phishing vector; straight-up exploitable bugs) or simply a net-negative annoyance for most users.

You must feel that way about push notifications from apps too then? You seem strongly against push. If you only dislike push on websites, why?

If Apple thinks push notifications are annoying, why does iOS have them? Again, Apple is protecting their walled garden. That's all this is. There really is no other good faith argument for this.

People don't switch between ten just-installed apps in under a minute. They do that all the time on the Web. There's more focus on what you're doing when you open an app for the first time, and installing the app in the first place is a strong signal that you're open to entertaining requests to expand permissions, like to receive push notifications. Browsing to a website is something people do on a whim while barely paying attention, which they don't consider any kind of commitment at all, and they're used to sites going away entirely when they close the tab, not sticking around because they clicked "allow" on a dialog that they don't even remember because the action didn't rise to the level of conscious thought, since the web bombards them with "allow/deny" boxes all day long, where "allow" is just the thing that consistently makes the dialog go away the fastest so they can get on with looking at the site.

Web notifications are not comparable to app push.

they sort of do, albeit with a custom api and requiring you to register as a developer: https://developer.apple.com/notifications/safari-push-notifi...

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