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Comment by paulgb | Hacker News Reader

I'm excited to see support for Web Push. I realize that most people associate it with spammy sites asking for permission to send you notifications you don't want, but I think it hasn't really been given a chance because it lacks iOS support.

Some things that it enables:

- Low-friction asynchronous turn-based games (think “Words with Friends” but you don't have to install an app)

- Single-purpose alerts (like CamelCamelCamel) or stock alerts without cluttering your email inbox

- Easily scriptable notifications from your own code (I run notify.run which provides an HTTPS-to-WebPush bridge so you can send yourself a push notification from curl)

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Just to add:

- Getting notifications from websites I want notifications from

This should not be impossible just because there are 5 trillion websites I don't want notifications from.

Exactly, why can't there be presets to set the trust level on websites?

- Hey, it seems like you want to use our notification feature, and we are delighted. For us to be able to push you messages, you need to set out trust level to "App", to do this...

I mean, nobody will open a menu and click on 3 things for a spammy website, but many people will do it for their favorite 3 sites.

- Clicking on this button will trust this website (example com) as an [App] and give it the ability to store information on your device, and send you notifications. Please don't do this for the sites you don't trust. [Cancel] [I trust this website]

Our grandparents can run random executable from the internet and with some common-sense training and scary popups from anti-virus and UAC, it is still risky but tolerable. This is way more secure and easier, why cant this work?

- You already trust this app (example com) and it can already store information on your device and send you notifications. Clicking on this button will add it to your trusted apps and allow it to ask for files stored on your device by other apps, and also allow it to ask to access your contacts. These permissions will be only available when you are actively using the app. [Cancel] [Add example com to trusted apps]

Please some browser implement this.

Except make it wayyyy more fine grained so I can give the app permission to store files but not send notifications or to access the files of one other app but not another. Something like Apple's fine-grained photos permissions would be good.

Edge exactly did that.

It collects feedback from users. If a site got rejected by literally every user. It will be put into the `don't even bother prompt the users` list.

And start from this point.

No edge user will be prompt actively by that site (There will still be a icon on the url bar. If the user really really want to enable it, he can click it himself).

Do we know which sites are in that "no prompt" list?

Sounds like a ripe for abuse on a competitor’s site. How does Edge identity the reporting users?

FYI, that just buckets you into the "false-prompt" or "prompt-to-prompt" pattern.

eg: https://blog.hurree.co/blog/ios-push-notification-permission...

Make it even simpler. If the website is installed as a Web App on your iPhone home screen (it has an icon), it can ask for and send notifications. It appears in your list of apps in notifications in Settings and can be fine-tuned that way.

You remove it from your home screen and the notification permission disappears.

The bugs related to notifications currently seen in the beta are due to this user interaction not yet being implemented I'd bet.

The problem is, that you can always "force" the user to allow you notifications or cannot proceed. And $GREEDY_MEGACORP would abuse their power and send you a "verification code" through the push notification, else you cannot process the signup etc.

The good thing about the Apple Appstore, that promotional/marketing push notifications are forbidden and will get your App banned from the Appstore. Just allowing generic WebPush on PWAs will result in companies requiring it with dark patterns, just to increase your "engagement" with their product (read: send you spam).

I have mixed feelings about webpush, I myself as a developer want it for my users, but I see the history of the web and how everything nice got destroyed eventually by spam.

> that promotional/marketing push notifications are forbidden

Not anymore they’re not. It wasn’t enforced when it was on the books; last year the rule was removed. Even Apple advertise their own services via push now.

As others point out, promotional pushes are allowed on iOS.

A site can refuse to give you content if you don't allow push notifications but in practice that doesn't happen because the incentive of the site is to have more traffic. Android has had this capability for an eon and I have never experienced a site try to force you to accept push notifications.

I have also never observed a site try to use push notifications as a "verification" method. Do you have an example of this in the wild?

And you can always control your allowance of push notifications after the fact, either at the moment you receive the offending notification or from the site settings. Android specifically has a fantastic way to do this without even leaving your notification area. Not sure how Apple's system works in that regard.

rottentomatoes is an example site that blocks if you have ads or tracker blockers

Plenty of sites lock you out if you have an ad blocker, here we're talking about locking you out because you have not granted them permission to send you web push notifications...

The argument IIRC is sites want eyeballs and wouldn’t block content if you don’t grant notification permissions. Blocking for Ad/trackers is not so dissimilar

They don’t make money if they don’t have ads and trackers. Push notification is just to get you to visit more often. Why would they want to serve the site to freeloaders

This problem is not a problem if you have incoming information filters, which email had for ages. You don’t have to have mixed feelings, just split it in two parts and have clear feelings of each.

The real problem is that corporations treat all users as idiots who can’t control their software. But a big part of them are not. These talks about users unable to setup their devices (or to get help from someone who can) is nonsense they want us to believe in. And I see signs everywhere that most of software-versed people already believe in it. Feels like seeing sophisticated math proofs, all based on 1+1==3 for some reason.

> The good thing about the Apple Appstore, that promotional/marketing push notifications are forbidden and will get your App banned from the Appstore.

Lol, no it won't.

Apple do promotional notifications themselves even.

Can you though? Wouldn't it be enough to create interface that would let you view notifications of currently opened tab without giving it permission to show them through OS interface in background?

I just wish that “web applications” were more clearly distinguished from regular web sites.

I hate that a regular website I may tap on a search result would ever want to send me notifications. But, if a site that is clearly more of an “application” to me (like an online spreadsheet or chat app, etc) wants to send me notifications, that could be a useful feature.

If there were a more clear delineation between the two, I could just avoid tapping anything that is labeled as an “app” in search results (or just ban them from my search engine), and restrict myself to “plain old webpages” only when searching. And “plain old webpages” would be even further restricted than they already are: No notifications prompts, no ability to see my accelerometer, no offline storage available, etc etc.

It’s nice that the web has turned into a viable app platform, but it doesn’t mean I want every page I visit to be allowed to have “app-like” capabilities. In an ideal world 95% of the web would just be plain old documents accessed over HTTP(S) and the “apps” would be distinguishable as such.

Interesting idea, but it sort of falls down in my mind when I think about forums. I want notifications for some forums that I join. And I certainly don't want to remove forums from search results. They're the only place you can get decent product reviews right now.

A great heuristic would just be only granting notification prompt permission after you’ve installed the PWA to your Home Screen. That shows clear interest by the user in a longer-term relationship with the app, and they could grant other expanded prompt permissions based on that also.

This will probably be the way it's handled honestly. I think it's the best option.

how it is handled, on modern devices, for years.

Most users never add a shortcut to the home screen and yet use plenty of web apps.

Apple could certainly do more to help people understand that they can install web apps to their home screen. Right now, it is an option that few users are aware of, buried in the menus as it is, and even fewer think about it.

When a related app is available in the App Store, Apple will show a big banner at the top of the web page encouraging you to install it... but they won't do anything for a PWA.

I think requiring "installation" of a PWA is a great way to balance the concerns people have about getting spammed with requests to spam you with notifications you don't want... but I also wish Apple would support PWAs better in general, so I can see it both ways.

I would find this type of differentiation useful as well. “Plain” sites are generally faster to skim through for what I’m looking for, (no gauntlet of spinning loading wheels and dialogs or JS gumming up functions like Find in Page) so it would be nice to be able to prioritize those in search results.

One way to do this would be for the crawler to compare the content of JS-enabled and JS-disabled states and if they differ dramatically, the web destination gets tossed in the “web app” bucket.

Hate to break this to you but even a website that consists of nothing but HTML (no CSS/JS) is still an "app". It's still being executed in the runtime environment of your browser when you load it. Just because the website chose to limit it's use of the features to just one (HTML) doesn't mean it's not an app (when executed in a web browser).

If you read that HTML in a text editor then yeah, that's not an app but if you're reading it in a web browser you're "running it".

I’d love to have a chrome person comment on the actual stats of web push usage because no non-developer I’ve interacted with has ever intentionally accepted push spam.

I think all developers think that their site is somehow unique in the value of their notifications, despite all evidence to the contrary.

I hope the prospect of iOS support will prod Google into finally fixing Web Push on Android. It is fundamentally broken right now. Notifications are routinely delayed somewhere between 10 minutes and several hours and there is no workaround. This doesn't really change its effectiveness for spam, but it totally destroys any utility for actually useful applications like messaging or timely alerts. Which is why you have only seen spammers using it so far.

>- Easily scriptable notifications from your own code (I run notify.run which provides an HTTPS-to-WebPush bridge so you can send yourself a push notification from curl)

The article speculates that it might not be freely available like push notifications are for firefox/chrome.

>Maybe we have to register the origin with the Apple Developer Program, similar to the Safari Push Notification program for macOS. If this is the case, the developer will have to pay the annual Apple Developer Program fee to send push messages to their web users.

In that case you're probably better off installing a notification app from the appstore to handle it, eg. pushover/pushbullet.

I don't get push notifications. If I don't have time to poll your service, I don't have time to respond to a notification. Besides, I'd rather not have my priorities determined for me.

That really depends on the service. If it's a messaging app, then I'm not exactly going to poll a service until a new message arrives. Or any other type of app that I'm not checking if there's no updates.

I suppose async communication with another person makes sense.

If Apple do do this, which I'm not certain they will, I imagine they'll be very restrictive on the permissions. Can only prompt to be enabled from a direct user action (eg a button click), and the latest iOS notifications prompt quite often if you want to keep them or stop them.

It does not work right now and probably will require Apple whitelisting your website.

So, once this is integrated clicking a link will have the following experience:

1) Tracking preferences overlay that will have a wall of text with "Accept all" and "Customise" buttons that would not be clickable the first few tries.

2) Then you will have a modal that asks for your e-mail address so you can receive the newsletters from the website that you are trying to understand what is this all about.

3) And now you will have a prompt that asks you if you like to receive notifications.

4) Once you are done with all this, half of the page will be covered with links and menus to the other parts of the website and when you scroll menus and overlays with call with action will appear and disappear

5) The rest of the website will be ads.

6) Hopefully somewhere there will be an image or paragraph, you will be able to find it if you still remember why you click on the link

7) if you scroll a bit too much the screen will be blacked out and a call for action(sign up for a newsletter, create account, download the app or buy something) will appear and will have hard to identify close button that won't be working the first few taps.

My point is, the Web is not a garbage because Safari lacks notification or something like that and it is not salvageable without finding a new business model.

Wouldn't be great to have a notification once the new Wordle of the day arrives? Sure. But the business model of it appears to be selling it to the people who love all the steps from 1 to 7 listed above. I don't blame the creator of the game, it's just a testament of the state of the Web business.

I prefer apps for that reason. They also seem to be riddled with full screen ads(especially the casual games are horrible) that make your phone warm BUT you get yo see a high quality screen(App Store, Google Play etc.) where you can read reviews, description and see screenshots before committing into installing the app(Unlike the web apps where you first "install" the app and then you are on your own to figure out what is this all about).

Besides the questionable practices of Apple/Google, there's barely any reason to have browsers with PWA capabilities. I would love it if the web browsers had JS off by default and load JS only when the user explicitly requests it.

Most of the noise comes from Web technologists don't want to learn anything beyond JavaScript.

I hope Apple doesn't cave and if they do, I hope they implement it in a way that improves the experience of the USER. If I wanted an Android experience, I would have used an Android phone, let's keep the iPhone experience like a iPhone experience.

> Wouldn't be great to have a notification once the new Wordle of the day arrives?

Nitpick, but for that specific example, not really, since it's always at local midnight according to your device's time setting (for certain values of "arrive", since all past and future wordles are always present in the page source).

[EDIT] Oh and:

> Besides the questionable practices of Apple/Google, there's barely any reason to have browsers with PWA capabilities. I would love it if the web browsers had JS off by default and load JS only when the user explicitly requests it.

I think the biting of the apple, if you will, for the web, was allowing Javascript to ever initiate requests on its own, or modify e.g. post request content or URLs pre-flight without user review and explicit OK. It's fucking absurd that clicking a link to a site means it gets to track your mouse movements and send them, live, to some server somewhere, and that disabling that means wrecking most of the web and making it a pain to use. No transmitting data without explicit user action and review, I say.

> Most of the noise comes from Web technologists don't want to learn anything beyond JavaScript.

I agree with a lot of what you wrote, but not this. PWAs are the only path for allowing open publishing of apps that is not gated by a large tech firm. While I completely understand the value proposition of app stores, there are tons of app scenarios held back by them. Two instances are small web[0] and situated software[1] as app stores keep people from publishing apps meant for small audiences by their very definition. Both of these fall under your desire to maximize the user experience.

Furthermore, PWAs are the closest thing we have to a “universal” platform. Personally, if I could write an app that worked on all mobile devices and the web in COBOL, I’d be thrilled to write “PROCEDURE DIVISION” every day.

The web is a mess because it is open. The web can be scammy because some people are scammy. Restricting PWAs doesn’t mitigate scamminess - it just restricts openness.

[0] https://ar.al/2020/08/07/what-is-the-small-web/ [1] https://www.gwern.net/docs/technology/2004-03-30-shirky-situ...

I wouldn't call PWAs universal platform when they are very dependent on Google being nice with Chrome. Also, browsers already have integrated blocking mechanism that is supposed to block out phishing sites etc. but that's only the case because so far the browser infrastructure operators(Mozilla, Google, Apple) are acting nice. The Push notification infrastructure is also possible only because the browser infrastructure operators are being nice so far.

At any point Google or other browser makers can choose not to be nice or can be compelled to follow regulatory orders.

The only universal thing about PWAs is the availability of Google Chrome to all major platforms and that's up to the courtesy of Google. They may choose not to do it at any time, they may choose to discontinue their push notification backend just like that.

Browsers are not standalone apps anymore, they are dependent on the backend services of the browser company. That's especially important when they need to run PWA.

> very dependent on Google being nice with Chrome

Replace Apple/Safari+Google/Chrome with Google/Gmail+Microsoft/Outlook and you currently describe e-mail. That situation is still preferable to the tons of messaging walled gardens. And the web is getting new feature albeit slowly and unevenly in a way that mail is not.

I really want to see PWAs become a viable option for distribution, but you do have a point. I sometimes end up on websites using my iPad where I can't even read the content. I wonder why the company would publish a site so poor that it seems like they didn't even try it on an iPad and then I remember they've already gotten my ad impressions, so they've gotten everything they want and don't care if I get to read the content.

I don't think those sites get penalized much either. I arrived via search or a link and they don't get demoted in search or have that link removed. I can't flag them as being a bad site or "take back" my view. I find it very frustrating.

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