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Comment by halfstep | Hacker News Reader

I really wish browsers would take this approach with notifications.

If a website asks if I have notifications enabled, tell them yes, and send them all into the oblivion.

Edit: to clarify, I already disable all notifications in Firefox. I was referring to websites that check via JavaScript whether you have notifications turned on and trigger a pop up to ask you to enable them.

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How's that different from just having it globally disabled? I've never had a site refuse to work at all because I haven't allowed it to send desktop notifications, does that happen?

I think he's saying the JavaScript nag message every time you visit one of these sites is annoying.

Just disable notifications. There's a setting for it in Chrome and Firefox, I'm sure there's a setting for Safari and the various Chromium forks as well. Set the notification permission to "deny by default" so you can manually opt into notifications later on a per site basis.

Yup. I have this on Firefox. Makes the web so much better. The only indication that the site asked for notifications is that there is a subtle "notifications denied" icon in the location bar. For the maybe two sites where I have enabled notifications I just click it and allow them.

You can disable notifications globally. I did it. Zero regrets. My browser is a hypertext document viewer, not an operating system.

Here's also a userscript that removes the service worker API from Chromium browsers:

    // ==UserScript==
    // @name         Remove service worker API
    // @namespace    http://tampermonkey.net/
    // @version      0.1
    // @description  try to take over the world!
    // @author       You
    // @match        https://*/*
    // @grant        none
    // @run-at       document-start
    // ==/UserScript==
    
    delete Object.getPrototypeOf(navigator).serviceWorker;

In Firefox, iirc you can disable that API somewhere in about:config.

Why?

I don't enable notifications and it's fine, I've never had a problem.

If you don't want notifications, why would you still want the website to send them?

Some websites will check whether you have notifications enabled and spawn an in-page pop up requesting access before they trigger the actual, native browser request.

So ideally this would stop that from happening.

It is so common that r/assholedesign has a specific rule not to post that kind of asshole design (because it is now boring).

But sites that do it are hostile and should just be blocked. What other shenanigans are they pulling?

The best response to those websites is closing them and blocking them in your DNS blacklist to be honest. Either that, or full their newsletter subscription box with a million fake email addresses.

Yeah that's fair. It feels like we're in an anti-pattern arms race and choosing to not participate is a valid call.

On macOS you can disable notifications for any app in System Settings. When an app first requests it, you’ll get a system notification asking if you want to allow the app to send any.

On Safari you can even disable the option for websites to request notification access. It’s on the Websites tab in Settings.

Well, the user should be allowed to easily program it to send the notifications (or any other stuff that the web page may do) to a file (e.g. /dev/null) or to a pipe (e.g. a program that filters notifications).

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