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Comment by throwingrocks | Hacker News Reader

Does this person work for Apple?

I love how people here are simultaneously for pushing the web platform forward and also for holding it back.

This feature should never have existed. I used to work in a computer repair shop and saw hundreds of people with spam, scams, and malicious content piped directly to their computer. Most people have no idea how to make it stop, have no idea where it came from, but are aware it's happening and hate it.

Browser push is probably close to 100% malicious or ads at this point. It's directly enabled scammers to steal 10s of millions of dollars.

If Google came out with a feature that just stole $50 of iTunes gift cards from your granny no one would want it. That was browser push is at this point.

Yes, these types of stories are incredibly common unfortunately. The advice here should be taken on board by any repair shop.

>This feature should never have existed

The feature is needed for browser based mail, chat, calendar, meetings etc like office.com, Teams, Slack

Yes, they all have native apps but some like to use web versions or being logged in to different accounts

The less-than-1% of Web push message volume that is desired and helpful is a no-brainer sacrifice to get rid of the 99+% that's unwanted, accidentally-enabled spam.

Of course, short of just getting rid of it, we could make it like RSS where there's just a little icon and you have to choose to engage with it to use it, otherwise you won't even realize it's there. But I expect that amounts to the same thing, and the feature'd be dead before long, being too much effort to keep up for something that nearly no-one would both know is there and want to use. Probably usage levels similar to FTP in the browser, and that got axed.

No, don't be ridiculous. Having rescued several people from the described situations I wrote this because because it's an abused feature.

If pushing the web forward is whatever the hell that assortment of notifications is at the top of the article, I'm all for holding it back.

Apple was right in restricting web notifications in the first place. The sad story is that they're abused way too much. :/

Now about how to fix that is an interesting question...

How does a poorly thought out spam channel "push the web platform forward"?

I don't understand why some people seem to believe anything that adds complexity is positive. Removing bad features is a good thing!

Just like making all popups disabled by default, so should these user harassing notification prompts.

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