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Comment by fakename11 | Hacker News Reader

OP probably wants site to be to send notifications even though Firefox’s research on the topic has shown that they are 99+ percent spam. I find it very annoying when I visit a site and there's an annoying pop-up asking for notifications (even though chrome and firefox block most automatically). The Mozilla study showed that sites already try and show 100s of billion notifications to users a year "Notification prompts are very unpopular. On Release, about 99% of notification prompts go unaccepted, with 48% being actively denied by the user." https://blog.mozilla.org/futurereleases/2019/11/04/restricti... I also would bet that most acceptance clicks by users were accidental.

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Notifications from Web sites are spam.

Web apps that can be made resident on your phone home screen are another story, where notifications may be legitimate (e.g. chat apps).

Notifications from websites that I don't want to receive are spam. Perhaps it's a webapp where I communicate with friends, and want to be notified.

I tried using the web notification API for a project recently - a project which is putting users' needs and wants above anything else. Our users wanted to receive push notifications whenever we go live, so the initial prototype used SMS notifications since that's what we were already using.

Over time, the cost of these (completely optional and opt-IN) notifications grew enough that I figured it was time to seek an alternative. I fully implemented WebPush notifications and evaluated them with my users. I found that most Android devices wouldn't vibrate nor make a sound when a notification is received, and iOS straight up doesn't support these APIs. With these findings, I scrapped the entire implementation. It was useless to our users and only led to more confusion.

If I had to guess, I would say that is the exact reason 99% of WebPush usage is spammy. Spammers don't really care about quality of service, they just want to cast a wide net. I'm willing to bet the API would see a massive uptick in legitimate adoption if it wasn't so utterly useless in the real world.

There is nothing stopping Firefox from saying x,y and z APIs are considered dangerous and web app only, and gating them behind the PWA install prompt.

I want Apple to do this as well to put pressure on google to fix their shit with letting these run rampant on the web.

that sounds right, i block about 99% of notifications on my phone, regardless of wehther they're from webapps or native apps. but the 1% i don't block are incredibly useful and the main reason i have a phone in the first place

i hope nobody is deciding that no apps should ever be allowed to send notifications, just because most notifications get blocked. it's still an incredibly useful feature even if most apps use it poorly.

You can say the same thing about email, but yet there are plenty of legitimate use cases. Cases include chat apps like slack, you might want to see when someone has messaged you even though you might not have the slack tab open. Are you attending a music festival and have the schedule open for an artist you want to see, well the concerts have been delayed 20 min, would be handy to get a push notification telling you that.

I find it hard to believe that I would get notified for anything useful but I am absolutely certain I will be notified incessantly for things that don’t matter. In fact the later spoils it for the former because the later train people to ignore notifications.

For instance any shop I create an account with (Best Buy, Ulta Beauty, …) thinks I want to hear from them once a day or more often. If they tried to keep it relevant it would be one thing but it is really a conversation where one side talks talks and talks and the other isn’t listening. Right now on Arstechnia’s Dealmaster they are talking like it is news that Amazon Fire tablets on sale but they ought to just send me a notice when Fire tablets aren’t on sale.

We're talking about PWAs the user chooses to install. Of course they want to get notified. In my case I want to run Fastmail and WhatsApp. What use are they to me if they don't notify me when I get a message.

People in this thread keep confusing notification request from random websites with notification requests from web apps you WANT to get notified from. It's a thing. And all browser offer a per-site preference. Having PWA support doesn't mean being spammed by every site you visit.

It seems like this framework is addressing that but so far a PWA is a disorganized patchwork of features that might seem to fit together if you squint. For instance the user has no control over how much IndexedDB storage is used if any, and that the only thing you do have consent for is notifications…. Which normally is a request to spam, maybe 10% of the time it is a ‘real’ PWA but I am sure the majority of those are spam too.

People who use the web are used to being spammed at every turn so naturally they are going to expect any feature usually used for spam to be used for spamming. It doesn’t help that PWA hasn’t had clear branding that ordinary people would understand.

Nobody cares about notifications.

It's all about the shitty browser storage on iOS.

Pretty sure I want to know when I have a new message

Yeah if Safari wouldn't break localStorage or indexDB every other version, that would work better already and a nice start.

yes. go and check a regular friends' chrome browser. notifications left and right, constant irritant of "breaking news" and "check this out" from essentially spam sites. i am grateful of preventing notifications by default

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