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Firefox Can Now Get Push Notifications from Your Favorite Sites

203 points by e15ctr0n 11y ago

codereflection 11y ago
Anyone know of websites that have enabled the push notification feature?
- natch 11y ago
  Since the feature (as far as I know) started with Safari, some Apple-centric sites were early adopters, so sites like macrumors and appleinsider have it. But as far as more mainstream, one I know of is CNN, which has it for breaking news.
  - nsm 11y ago
    The Safari feature is non-standard. Firefox implements the WebPush API that Chrome also supports. So sites supporting Safari will not automatically work in Firefox.
- apocalyptic0n3 11y ago
  Facebook supports it, I believe. And maybe Gmail, though that one could be Chrome-only.
  - ascagnel_ 11y ago
    GMail has notification support in Safari, but it seems to be broken currently.
  - lucaspiller 11y ago
    Facebook Messenger too (http://www.messenger.com/ http://www.messenger.com/), although you have to thankfully enable it in the settings.
- rsoto 11y ago
  We're using Roost[1] to notify our users for relevant information. There's a demo there. 1: https://goroost.com/try-web-push https://goroost.com/try-web-push
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- gdeglin 11y ago
  Here's a list of larger ones I'm aware of (These sites have it enabled for Chrome, some may not yet have it enabled for Firefox): Facebook Vice.com eBay www.mercurynews.com
  - pawelk 11y ago
    Slack chat also displays desktops notifications in Chrome.
    - nacs 11y ago
      Also gitter ( https://gitter.im https://gitter.im )
natch 11y ago
I use this feature selectively in Safari now, and am glad to see it in Firefox. Eventually I'm sure I'll run into the problem of getting duplicate notifications from the same sites. I wonder what the solution for that will be... running only one browser at a time is not an option. Maybe I'll have to keep track of and choose just one browser per site for allowing notifications. Why have two browsers open at once? So that I can be logged into Google services simultaneously with two different accounts (personal and work). Off topic, but would be glad to know if there's another way to do that.
- lotso 11y ago
  Google supports multi-user login. There are some annoyances with it, but it works pretty well for me.
- ahoy 11y ago
  Can't firefox have multiple user accounts? You'd have to swap back and forth though, which may be less convenient than alt-tabbing over to safari.
  - rhelmer 11y ago
    Firefox supports profiles, you can use the Profilist extension which makes it easy to switch between (I keep a separate profile for sites I use my work login on) https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/profilist/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/profilist/
    - darkr 11y ago
      You can also state which profile to use on startup, I have a shell alias setup for each of my 5 or so profiles, so I can just run ffx_work or ffx_personal etc
- ender7 11y ago
  Chrome supports multiple user accounts. I do this for my work and personal accounts. You don't have to switch between them; you can have windows from both accounts open at the same time.
gdeglin 11y ago
For anyone who would like a demo and real-world example, my company put together a website to let you subscribe to Web Push notifications for trending Hacker News stories: https://hackernews.onesignal.com/ https://hackernews.onesignal.com/
- netcraft 11y ago
  so chrome supports the notifications but only if you are currently on the page? is that right?
  - gdeglin 11y ago
    No. Chrome has supported notifications even when you have no browser windows open since Chrome 42, released mid 2015. https://developers.google.com/web/fundamentals/getting-started/push-notifications/?hl=en https://developers.google.com/web/fundamentals/getting-start...
    - akerro 11y ago
      >Chrome has supported notifications even when you have no browser windows open Chrome is literally botnet
    - netcraft 11y ago
      Is this page out of date or are those two other features related to the push api that arent supported by chrome unrelated to what firefox just released? https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Push_API https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Push_API
      - gdeglin 11y ago
        It's not out of date. Chrome does not yet support Message Payloads in the public release, here's their description for it on chromestatus.com: https://www.chromestatus.com/feature/5746279325892608 https://www.chromestatus.com/feature/5746279325892608 The workaround for now is to have the service worker fetch the payload from an API endpoint that the sender implements themselves.
ignostic 11y ago
RSS readers seem like such a good idea, but they've hardly caught on outside of tech groups. They weren't intuitive enough for most people to use, and we didn't want another interface that we had to check. We also didn't want it to fill up our inboxes with notifications when we didn't have time to read. IMO, that's why Facebook continues to work well. You see updates from the people and the sites you want, and it's not at all overwhelming. There's no backlog of notifications to stress you out. Done right, I think browser notifications could be the solution we're looking for. I look forward to seeing different implementations. There are already plugins for major CMSs.
- merpnderp 11y ago
  This could be RSS feeds without needing an RSS feedreader. Sites you are interested in could just send you updates when they have something you might find interesting. Click it open in a tab and read at your leisure.
- digi_owl 11y ago
  Thats because they were never properly rolled into the browser UI. They were either stand along programs you had to be running, or were implemented as "live bookmarks".
- hackuser 11y ago
  > We also didn't want it to fill up our inboxes with notifications when we didn't have time to read. 1) Why would this messaging system deliver fewer notifications than RSS (besides the fact that few sites use this system yet)? 2) Why are popups on my screen a better interface than a mail-like interface? I strongly prefer the latter if I'm receiving many messages; lots of popups seem unpleasant.
- illicium 11y ago
  Publishers can't serve effectively serve ads through RSS. Ads have to be rolled into the post body and if the feedreader caches images, you can't track impressions. A way around it is to serve a preview of the article and require readers to read the rest on the publisher's website, but at that point you might as well just use Twitter.
tetraodonpuffer 11y ago
anybody know if fastmail is planning to support this? that would be cool (even cooler if it could be set up on a per-folder basis) would be nice having a biff equivalent working in the browser without having to code something using IMAP...
callahad 11y ago
More developer-oriented information at https://hacks.mozilla.org/2016/01/web-push-arrives-in-firefox-44/ https://hacks.mozilla.org/2016/01/web-push-arrives-in-firefo... I'd also highly recommend checking out the examples at https://serviceworke.rs/ https://serviceworke.rs/
untog 11y ago
Of particular note, this also works on Android Chrome. So a site can send push notifications much like an app can. The Facebook mobile site uses it, so I've been able to remove the Facebook app entirely from my phone. I really wish Apple would implement this as well, as it would remove the requirement for a number of apps that are just thinly wrapped webviews. Sadly, I don't think Apple's business model will allow it...
- callahad 11y ago
  Apple rolled their own, non-standard Push workalike at https://developer.apple.com/notifications/safari-push-notifications/ https://developer.apple.com/notifications/safari-push-notifi... which is available to members of the $99/yr Mac Developer Program.
  - untog 11y ago
    ...on desktop only. Which, in a way, make it even more glaring that they haven't done it on mobile.
    - JohnTHaller 11y ago
      It does make you raise an eyebrow and wonder if they're holding back Safari (which all iOS users have to use in one way or another) to keep people using the app store and giving Apple their 30%.
      - reustle 11y ago
        It is a shame, but not surprising, that they are both holding back Safari mobile AND other browsers from rolling their own full browser (chrome)
  - FussyZeus 11y ago
    I was wondering why that feature wasn't publicized more, now I understand: It's a dev only thing. Thanks for that, settled my curiosity.
jasonkostempski 11y ago
This sounds like it will as annoying as the Safari "Download Our App" API. Please tell me I'm wrong.
mrfusion 11y ago
Could you use this on someone's Twitter? I have a bear of a time knowing when new content is posted.
- pawelk 11y ago
  That's up to Twitter to implement it.
overcast 11y ago
So does this mean I'll get even more of those annoying messages about adding notifications like in Safari?
merpnderp 11y ago
I can't believe how excited I am about this. My only apprehension is will the big vendors not push to their competition? Like will GMail push to IE, Firefox, and Safari and vice versa?
junto 11y ago
Sounds like Web slices, which Microsoft just killed off: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_Slice https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_Slice
drdaeman 11y ago
Is there any short explanation how this works under the hood? Does the browser maintain an open connection (like a Websocket) for each subscription, or there are some brokers, or if it can use OS facilities (like GCM/APN on mobile) when available, etc etc. In particular, I'm curious of privacy implications. When I subscribe - what site knows of me (say, if that's a direct connections, I'm not sure I want to tell every site out there when I'm online), or if any third parties are involved - what they know and do (say, what's about sender and receiver authentication)? From what I saw (but really not sure I got it right), it seems that I have to trust browser vendor and maintain a live connection to some Mozilla server, that'd listen for events (POSTs from sites) and aggregate them for me. But I'm not sure I understood it correctly. I'll surely investigate this properly, but reading standards is tough, and end-user introductions written by marketing people are virtually useless. So I wonder if there's a short reading to get the overall picture quick, but still see all the important details.
- callahad 11y ago
  I believe my article on Hacks (https://hacks.mozilla.org/2016/01/web-push-arrives-in-firefox-44/ https://hacks.mozilla.org/2016/01/web-push-arrives-in-firefo...), linked from the marketing article, answers all of those questions at a high level and points to docs with more detail. In short, there's a single, persistent websocket connection between you and a broker service run by your browser vendor. Each subscription has a unique, anonymous URL on that service that gets provided to the website. To prevent abuse, there are throttles / quotas / limits imposed on push messages that do not show user-visible notifications. The source to Mozilla's broker, autopush, is at https://github.com/mozilla-services/autopush https://github.com/mozilla-services/autopush. We recently rewrote it from Go into Python, which we now run with PyPy in production.
  - fancy_pantser 11y ago
    > We recently rewrote it from Go into Python I am used to porting things the other direction; can I ask why you moved to Python for this service?
    - 11y ago
jameshart 11y ago
Excellent - I've been looking for a replacement for active desktop channels since 2002.
rajacombinator 11y ago
Does anyone actually intentionally subscribe to these? I can think of few things more annoying than getting blogspam "notifications" on my laptop.
- gdeglin 11y ago
  Yep, I find them to be really useful from Facebook and I can't wait until Slack implements them. One of the nice features of Web Push notifications is that they each have an unsubscribe button on the notification itself. So once you don't want to get them from a website anymore, the block button is immediately available.
  - Klathmon 11y ago
    Slack already does them for me on desktop chrome.
  - artifaxx 11y ago
    Your response surprises me, I subscribed to the notifications for less than a day before I unsubscribed. If you don't mind me asking, how many a day do you get and why do you like getting the notifications?
    - gdeglin 11y ago
      Overall I get about 3 to 4 notifications from Facebook per day, so the quantity isn't too high. It also helps me avoid the habit of frequently loading Facebook to check for new notifications when there usually aren't any.
      - artifaxx 11y ago
        Thanks for the perspective, checking for notifications could be even more of a distraction in some cases!
        nevi-me 11y ago
vonklaus 11y ago
This is a HUGE game changer, so excited. The number one feature request year over year has been around push notifications. It's a really big pain point for a lot of people in media trying to spam users. They block all of the high bandwith offsite resources they try to shove down peoples throats and the scripts to shut down those scripts. Finally, companies can just trick you into accepting notifications and the problem is solved. This is great for the acerage user too. Social networks are notorious for making it difficult to engage or get updates about your friends. So this will finally eliminate the friction around realtime relationship status changes and well informed election posts
- windlep 11y ago
  Unfortunately you can click on the notification in Firefox and immediately kill all further notifications from the spammers. Hopefully other implementations will be more friendly to spammers and hide the 'make it stop' button deep in a sub-sub menu under an elusive Settings app.
- ossreality 11y ago
  Are you fucking kidding me HN? This bullshit sarcastic post is #1 in this thread? Shameful. Pure, unadulterated shame. I LOVE Chrome notifications on Android. Guess what? I have a good 25% extra battery life because I don't have Facebook for Android install, but still get push notifications via Chrome. I'm just disgusted this "snark" is upvoted.
discardorama 11y ago
Meanwhile, I sit here with the firefox usage pegged at 50%, and no way to tell which tab is killing the CPU. There's a 9-year-old bug open, requesting this feature. Now, before the fanboys jump in and say "it's open source, why don't you do it?", I'll admit that my hacking skillz are not enough to dive into Firefox source.
- GigabyteCoin 11y ago
  >There's a 9-year-old bug open, requesting this feature. Well is it a feature-request that a simple firefox extension could handle? Or is it a bug report about something inherently wrong with Firefox? Because it sounds like a feature request to me.
  - discardorama 11y ago
    It's a feature request. Without access to the innards, I don't think an extension would be able to do it.
- kevingadd 11y ago
  There's been a CPU profiler in the debugging tools for over a year, and before that there was one in the addon repository with documentation on the mozilla wiki. Could be easier (like Chrome's task manager) but it's not as hard as you seem to think it is. P.S. Chrome's task manager isn't accurate anymore because now a bunch of work is offloaded from the per-page processes to special catch-all processes like the 'GPU Process'. So this is actually a harder problem to solve than it seems at first glance...
  - dblohm7 11y ago
    There is also about:performance, though I'm not sure whether that has made its way to release yet.
- ucho 11y ago
  I guess they were waiting for Electrolysis to be integrated in official release, has that already happened?
pjbrunet 11y ago
Somebody make this into a WordPress plugin, so people can subscribe to category notifications without the need for RSS + Mailchimp. Make millions of bloggers happy.
detaro 11y ago
I love the contrast between the motivation statements on Firefox pages vs Chrome pages about the topic. Shows that Mozilla does remember their values, even though we like to bitch about them: Firefox[0]: ------------ Have you ever wished that a website could notify you when something important happened, even if you didn’t have the site open? Maybe you’ve got an incoming WebRTC call, an instant message, or a financial update. Perhaps your city just declared an emergency snow plowing schedule. Sometimes you just want to know when something happens. That’s what Web Push does. It’s available now in Firefox 44. Further down, they have "What about privacy?" section. Chrome[1]: ------------ If you ask a room of developers what mobile device features are missing from the web, push notifications are always high on the list. Push notifications allow your users to opt-in to timely updates from sites they love and allow you to effectively re-engage them with customized, engaging content. Thank you, Mozilla. [0] https://hacks.mozilla.org/2016/01/web-push-arrives-in-firefox-44/ https://hacks.mozilla.org/2016/01/web-push-arrives-in-firefo... [1] https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2015/03/push-notifications-on-the-open-web https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2015/03/push-notif...
- logicrook 11y ago
  Yes, thank you, Mozilla for the hypocritical statement. It changes so much about the result! I wouldn't say "we like to bitch about them", as Panorama, Thunderbird and FirefoxOS were an important part of my technological ecosystem. These points were dealt with much hypocrisy (they're dead but not dead, we just know it because of leaks...), which permanently stained my opinion of Mozilla.
  - rockdoe 11y ago
    Panorama, Thunderbird and FirefoxOS were an important part of my technological ecosystem They weren't an important part, or achieving being a part at all, of the ecosystem of the rest of the world, though. Not sure why you think continuing to pour resources into them after they were clearly lost causes is somehow a good idea, let alone it makes Mozilla hypocritical. Aside from the "me me me me it's all about me" syndrome that oozes from your statement. On the contrary, Web Push is an important feature needed for parity with native apps, so Firefox supporting them is a great result.
paraschopra 11y ago
We at Pushcrew also announced support for Firefox push notifications https://pushcrew.com/blog/firefox-website-push-notifications/ https://pushcrew.com/blog/firefox-website-push-notifications... We think it's a game changer too whereby, unlike email spam, users can opt into what information they want and really have much greater control. With Firefox, Chrome and Safari, browser push notifications are getting so much exciting.
j3116294 11y ago
I can't find a menu to see all push subscriptions in firefox. Going to each individual page to unsubscribe sounds like a pain. EDIT: about:permissions does the trick
handicapper 11y ago
I'm confused why it depends on a centralized relay. If it has to maintain a connection anyways it could just as well be a standard like favicon.ico.
nevi-me 11y ago
I've been using Push Notifications on my site for a few months now [0]. Having gone through the detail on this announcement, I'm a bit confused and would like some clarity. In Chrome & Chrome for Android, I have to use GCM to let the device know that there's a new message. The service worker then pings the server to find what the notifications are, before displaying them. Firefox supports sending payloads. How can I distinguish between endpoints registered from FF, so I can send payloads directly without going via GCM? Thanks [0] https://movinggauteng.co.za https://movinggauteng.co.za. Users need to log in via social media, and then grant permissions for notifications by clicking on the crossed out bell at the top of the page.

203 points by e15ctr0n 11y ago

codereflection 11y ago

Anyone know of websites that have enabled the push notification feature?

natch 11y ago
Since the feature (as far as I know) started with Safari, some Apple-centric sites were early adopters, so sites like macrumors and appleinsider have it. But as far as more mainstream, one I know of is CNN, which has it for breaking news.
- nsm 11y ago
  The Safari feature is non-standard. Firefox implements the WebPush API that Chrome also supports. So sites supporting Safari will not automatically work in Firefox.
apocalyptic0n3 11y ago
Facebook supports it, I believe. And maybe Gmail, though that one could be Chrome-only.
- ascagnel_ 11y ago
  GMail has notification support in Safari, but it seems to be broken currently.
- lucaspiller 11y ago
  Facebook Messenger too (http://www.messenger.com/ http://www.messenger.com/), although you have to thankfully enable it in the settings.
rsoto 11y ago
We're using Roost[1] to notify our users for relevant information. There's a demo there. 1: https://goroost.com/try-web-push https://goroost.com/try-web-push
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
gdeglin 11y ago
Here's a list of larger ones I'm aware of (These sites have it enabled for Chrome, some may not yet have it enabled for Firefox): Facebook Vice.com eBay www.mercurynews.com
- pawelk 11y ago
  Slack chat also displays desktops notifications in Chrome.
  - nacs 11y ago
    Also gitter ( https://gitter.im https://gitter.im )

natch 11y ago

I use this feature selectively in Safari now, and am glad to see it in Firefox. Eventually I'm sure I'll run into the problem of getting duplicate notifications from the same sites. I wonder what the solution for that will be... running only one browser at a time is not an option. Maybe I'll have to keep track of and choose just one browser per site for allowing notifications. Why have two browsers open at once? So that I can be logged into Google services simultaneously with two different accounts (personal and work). Off topic, but would be glad to know if there's another way to do that.

lotso 11y ago
Google supports multi-user login. There are some annoyances with it, but it works pretty well for me.
ahoy 11y ago
Can't firefox have multiple user accounts? You'd have to swap back and forth though, which may be less convenient than alt-tabbing over to safari.
- rhelmer 11y ago
  Firefox supports profiles, you can use the Profilist extension which makes it easy to switch between (I keep a separate profile for sites I use my work login on) https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/profilist/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/profilist/
  - darkr 11y ago
    You can also state which profile to use on startup, I have a shell alias setup for each of my 5 or so profiles, so I can just run ffx_work or ffx_personal etc
ender7 11y ago
Chrome supports multiple user accounts. I do this for my work and personal accounts. You don't have to switch between them; you can have windows from both accounts open at the same time.

gdeglin 11y ago

For anyone who would like a demo and real-world example, my company put together a website to let you subscribe to Web Push notifications for trending Hacker News stories: https://hackernews.onesignal.com/ https://hackernews.onesignal.com/

netcraft 11y ago
so chrome supports the notifications but only if you are currently on the page? is that right?
- gdeglin 11y ago
  No. Chrome has supported notifications even when you have no browser windows open since Chrome 42, released mid 2015. https://developers.google.com/web/fundamentals/getting-started/push-notifications/?hl=en https://developers.google.com/web/fundamentals/getting-start...
  - akerro 11y ago
    >Chrome has supported notifications even when you have no browser windows open Chrome is literally botnet
  - netcraft 11y ago
    Is this page out of date or are those two other features related to the push api that arent supported by chrome unrelated to what firefox just released? https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Push_API https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Push_API
    - gdeglin 11y ago
      It's not out of date. Chrome does not yet support Message Payloads in the public release, here's their description for it on chromestatus.com: https://www.chromestatus.com/feature/5746279325892608 https://www.chromestatus.com/feature/5746279325892608 The workaround for now is to have the service worker fetch the payload from an API endpoint that the sender implements themselves.

ignostic 11y ago

RSS readers seem like such a good idea, but they've hardly caught on outside of tech groups. They weren't intuitive enough for most people to use, and we didn't want another interface that we had to check. We also didn't want it to fill up our inboxes with notifications when we didn't have time to read. IMO, that's why Facebook continues to work well. You see updates from the people and the sites you want, and it's not at all overwhelming. There's no backlog of notifications to stress you out. Done right, I think browser notifications could be the solution we're looking for. I look forward to seeing different implementations. There are already plugins for major CMSs.

merpnderp 11y ago
This could be RSS feeds without needing an RSS feedreader. Sites you are interested in could just send you updates when they have something you might find interesting. Click it open in a tab and read at your leisure.
digi_owl 11y ago
Thats because they were never properly rolled into the browser UI. They were either stand along programs you had to be running, or were implemented as "live bookmarks".
hackuser 11y ago
> We also didn't want it to fill up our inboxes with notifications when we didn't have time to read. 1) Why would this messaging system deliver fewer notifications than RSS (besides the fact that few sites use this system yet)? 2) Why are popups on my screen a better interface than a mail-like interface? I strongly prefer the latter if I'm receiving many messages; lots of popups seem unpleasant.
illicium 11y ago
Publishers can't serve effectively serve ads through RSS. Ads have to be rolled into the post body and if the feedreader caches images, you can't track impressions. A way around it is to serve a preview of the article and require readers to read the rest on the publisher's website, but at that point you might as well just use Twitter.

tetraodonpuffer 11y ago

anybody know if fastmail is planning to support this? that would be cool (even cooler if it could be set up on a per-folder basis) would be nice having a biff equivalent working in the browser without having to code something using IMAP...

callahad 11y ago

More developer-oriented information at https://hacks.mozilla.org/2016/01/web-push-arrives-in-firefox-44/ https://hacks.mozilla.org/2016/01/web-push-arrives-in-firefo... I'd also highly recommend checking out the examples at https://serviceworke.rs/ https://serviceworke.rs/

untog 11y ago

Of particular note, this also works on Android Chrome. So a site can send push notifications much like an app can. The Facebook mobile site uses it, so I've been able to remove the Facebook app entirely from my phone. I really wish Apple would implement this as well, as it would remove the requirement for a number of apps that are just thinly wrapped webviews. Sadly, I don't think Apple's business model will allow it...

callahad 11y ago
Apple rolled their own, non-standard Push workalike at https://developer.apple.com/notifications/safari-push-notifications/ https://developer.apple.com/notifications/safari-push-notifi... which is available to members of the $99/yr Mac Developer Program.
- untog 11y ago
  ...on desktop only. Which, in a way, make it even more glaring that they haven't done it on mobile.
  - JohnTHaller 11y ago
    It does make you raise an eyebrow and wonder if they're holding back Safari (which all iOS users have to use in one way or another) to keep people using the app store and giving Apple their 30%.
    - reustle 11y ago
      It is a shame, but not surprising, that they are both holding back Safari mobile AND other browsers from rolling their own full browser (chrome)
- FussyZeus 11y ago
  I was wondering why that feature wasn't publicized more, now I understand: It's a dev only thing. Thanks for that, settled my curiosity.

jasonkostempski 11y ago

This sounds like it will as annoying as the Safari "Download Our App" API. Please tell me I'm wrong.

mrfusion 11y ago

Could you use this on someone's Twitter? I have a bear of a time knowing when new content is posted.

pawelk 11y ago
That's up to Twitter to implement it.

overcast 11y ago

So does this mean I'll get even more of those annoying messages about adding notifications like in Safari?

merpnderp 11y ago

I can't believe how excited I am about this. My only apprehension is will the big vendors not push to their competition? Like will GMail push to IE, Firefox, and Safari and vice versa?

junto 11y ago

Sounds like Web slices, which Microsoft just killed off: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_Slice https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_Slice

drdaeman 11y ago

Is there any short explanation how this works under the hood? Does the browser maintain an open connection (like a Websocket) for each subscription, or there are some brokers, or if it can use OS facilities (like GCM/APN on mobile) when available, etc etc. In particular, I'm curious of privacy implications. When I subscribe - what site knows of me (say, if that's a direct connections, I'm not sure I want to tell every site out there when I'm online), or if any third parties are involved - what they know and do (say, what's about sender and receiver authentication)? From what I saw (but really not sure I got it right), it seems that I have to trust browser vendor and maintain a live connection to some Mozilla server, that'd listen for events (POSTs from sites) and aggregate them for me. But I'm not sure I understood it correctly. I'll surely investigate this properly, but reading standards is tough, and end-user introductions written by marketing people are virtually useless. So I wonder if there's a short reading to get the overall picture quick, but still see all the important details.

callahad 11y ago
I believe my article on Hacks (https://hacks.mozilla.org/2016/01/web-push-arrives-in-firefox-44/ https://hacks.mozilla.org/2016/01/web-push-arrives-in-firefo...), linked from the marketing article, answers all of those questions at a high level and points to docs with more detail. In short, there's a single, persistent websocket connection between you and a broker service run by your browser vendor. Each subscription has a unique, anonymous URL on that service that gets provided to the website. To prevent abuse, there are throttles / quotas / limits imposed on push messages that do not show user-visible notifications. The source to Mozilla's broker, autopush, is at https://github.com/mozilla-services/autopush https://github.com/mozilla-services/autopush. We recently rewrote it from Go into Python, which we now run with PyPy in production.
- fancy_pantser 11y ago
  > We recently rewrote it from Go into Python I am used to porting things the other direction; can I ask why you moved to Python for this service?
  - 11y ago

jameshart 11y ago

Excellent - I've been looking for a replacement for active desktop channels since 2002.

rajacombinator 11y ago

Does anyone actually intentionally subscribe to these? I can think of few things more annoying than getting blogspam "notifications" on my laptop.

gdeglin 11y ago
Yep, I find them to be really useful from Facebook and I can't wait until Slack implements them. One of the nice features of Web Push notifications is that they each have an unsubscribe button on the notification itself. So once you don't want to get them from a website anymore, the block button is immediately available.
- Klathmon 11y ago
  Slack already does them for me on desktop chrome.
- artifaxx 11y ago
  Your response surprises me, I subscribed to the notifications for less than a day before I unsubscribed. If you don't mind me asking, how many a day do you get and why do you like getting the notifications?
  - gdeglin 11y ago
    Overall I get about 3 to 4 notifications from Facebook per day, so the quantity isn't too high. It also helps me avoid the habit of frequently loading Facebook to check for new notifications when there usually aren't any.
    - artifaxx 11y ago
      Thanks for the perspective, checking for notifications could be even more of a distraction in some cases!
      - nevi-me 11y ago

vonklaus 11y ago

This is a HUGE game changer, so excited. The number one feature request year over year has been around push notifications. It's a really big pain point for a lot of people in media trying to spam users. They block all of the high bandwith offsite resources they try to shove down peoples throats and the scripts to shut down those scripts. Finally, companies can just trick you into accepting notifications and the problem is solved. This is great for the acerage user too. Social networks are notorious for making it difficult to engage or get updates about your friends. So this will finally eliminate the friction around realtime relationship status changes and well informed election posts

windlep 11y ago
Unfortunately you can click on the notification in Firefox and immediately kill all further notifications from the spammers. Hopefully other implementations will be more friendly to spammers and hide the 'make it stop' button deep in a sub-sub menu under an elusive Settings app.
ossreality 11y ago
Are you fucking kidding me HN? This bullshit sarcastic post is #1 in this thread? Shameful. Pure, unadulterated shame. I LOVE Chrome notifications on Android. Guess what? I have a good 25% extra battery life because I don't have Facebook for Android install, but still get push notifications via Chrome. I'm just disgusted this "snark" is upvoted.

discardorama 11y ago

Meanwhile, I sit here with the firefox usage pegged at 50%, and no way to tell which tab is killing the CPU. There's a 9-year-old bug open, requesting this feature. Now, before the fanboys jump in and say "it's open source, why don't you do it?", I'll admit that my hacking skillz are not enough to dive into Firefox source.

GigabyteCoin 11y ago
>There's a 9-year-old bug open, requesting this feature. Well is it a feature-request that a simple firefox extension could handle? Or is it a bug report about something inherently wrong with Firefox? Because it sounds like a feature request to me.
- discardorama 11y ago
  It's a feature request. Without access to the innards, I don't think an extension would be able to do it.
kevingadd 11y ago
There's been a CPU profiler in the debugging tools for over a year, and before that there was one in the addon repository with documentation on the mozilla wiki. Could be easier (like Chrome's task manager) but it's not as hard as you seem to think it is. P.S. Chrome's task manager isn't accurate anymore because now a bunch of work is offloaded from the per-page processes to special catch-all processes like the 'GPU Process'. So this is actually a harder problem to solve than it seems at first glance...
- dblohm7 11y ago
  There is also about:performance, though I'm not sure whether that has made its way to release yet.
ucho 11y ago
I guess they were waiting for Electrolysis to be integrated in official release, has that already happened?

pjbrunet 11y ago

Somebody make this into a WordPress plugin, so people can subscribe to category notifications without the need for RSS + Mailchimp. Make millions of bloggers happy.

detaro 11y ago

I love the contrast between the motivation statements on Firefox pages vs Chrome pages about the topic. Shows that Mozilla does remember their values, even though we like to bitch about them: Firefox[0]: ------------ Have you ever wished that a website could notify you when something important happened, even if you didn’t have the site open? Maybe you’ve got an incoming WebRTC call, an instant message, or a financial update. Perhaps your city just declared an emergency snow plowing schedule. Sometimes you just want to know when something happens. That’s what Web Push does. It’s available now in Firefox 44. Further down, they have "What about privacy?" section. Chrome[1]: ------------ If you ask a room of developers what mobile device features are missing from the web, push notifications are always high on the list. Push notifications allow your users to opt-in to timely updates from sites they love and allow you to effectively re-engage them with customized, engaging content. Thank you, Mozilla. [0] https://hacks.mozilla.org/2016/01/web-push-arrives-in-firefox-44/ https://hacks.mozilla.org/2016/01/web-push-arrives-in-firefo... [1] https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2015/03/push-notifications-on-the-open-web https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2015/03/push-notif...

logicrook 11y ago
Yes, thank you, Mozilla for the hypocritical statement. It changes so much about the result! I wouldn't say "we like to bitch about them", as Panorama, Thunderbird and FirefoxOS were an important part of my technological ecosystem. These points were dealt with much hypocrisy (they're dead but not dead, we just know it because of leaks...), which permanently stained my opinion of Mozilla.
- rockdoe 11y ago
  Panorama, Thunderbird and FirefoxOS were an important part of my technological ecosystem They weren't an important part, or achieving being a part at all, of the ecosystem of the rest of the world, though. Not sure why you think continuing to pour resources into them after they were clearly lost causes is somehow a good idea, let alone it makes Mozilla hypocritical. Aside from the "me me me me it's all about me" syndrome that oozes from your statement. On the contrary, Web Push is an important feature needed for parity with native apps, so Firefox supporting them is a great result.

paraschopra 11y ago

We at Pushcrew also announced support for Firefox push notifications https://pushcrew.com/blog/firefox-website-push-notifications/ https://pushcrew.com/blog/firefox-website-push-notifications... We think it's a game changer too whereby, unlike email spam, users can opt into what information they want and really have much greater control. With Firefox, Chrome and Safari, browser push notifications are getting so much exciting.

j3116294 11y ago

I can't find a menu to see all push subscriptions in firefox. Going to each individual page to unsubscribe sounds like a pain. EDIT: about:permissions does the trick

handicapper 11y ago

I'm confused why it depends on a centralized relay. If it has to maintain a connection anyways it could just as well be a standard like favicon.ico.

nevi-me 11y ago

I've been using Push Notifications on my site for a few months now [0]. Having gone through the detail on this announcement, I'm a bit confused and would like some clarity. In Chrome & Chrome for Android, I have to use GCM to let the device know that there's a new message. The service worker then pings the server to find what the notifications are, before displaying them. Firefox supports sending payloads. How can I distinguish between endpoints registered from FF, so I can send payloads directly without going via GCM? Thanks [0] https://movinggauteng.co.za https://movinggauteng.co.za. Users need to log in via social media, and then grant permissions for notifications by clicking on the crossed out bell at the top of the page.