Chrome 42 Launches with Push Notifications

googlechromereleases.blogspot.com

10 points·millisecond··7 comments

I'm one of the founders of Roost (YCS14 - goroost.com). We're based on this standard and have been (a small) part of getting it out.

Happy to answer any questions on the base tech or our layer on top of it.

What has been done to ensure this can't be used to deliver malware, ads, spam, popups, etc?

edit: more than "you have to opt-in" because we know people don't willfully install malware on their computers; the malware writers trick people into clicking on it or installing it

There are several safe-guards, with more to come.

The biggest one that's coming is being able to unsubscribe directly from the notification pop-up itself. This will shut down abusers very quickly.

Beyond that:

-All notifications traverse GCM. Which means you've signed a ToS with Google and they can shut you down (also a little scary).

-Opt-in must happen on the main page, or have the main pages "consent". This prevents iframed ads registering people, for example.

-9/10 pushes must display a user visible element (that will have the unsub feature) which prevents people from being malicious on the background Service Worker thread.

More will come as this feature develops and it's seen how things play out in the wild.

This is comforting. Thanks for the detail.

Does the OS still recieve the notifications if the last Chrome window is closed?

Android yes; Others no

Chrome on Windows automatically leaves a process running even when you close the last window. I remember because I had to manually disable it some time ago.

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