5 ms·

Serious question though: has anyone here ever used the notifications for anything other than web based IM (slack, whatsapp)? I think the use case for legit not

by LeonM 8y ago

Serious question though: has anyone here ever used the notifications for anything other than web based IM (slack, whatsapp)? I think the use case for legit notifications is very small, thus the UI should be an opt-in, rather than an intrusive pop-up. I never understood why browser makers gave it such a prominent UI, and of course in this attention seeking market it was bound to be abused. The new UI that Firefox is suggesting in the article is good, this should have been like this from the first day. I hope other browser vendors quickly follow.

nkrisc 8y ago
I've seen some sites that do long tasks use them to alert you when the task is finished, so you can do something else while waiting and not miss when it finishes.
vasco 8y ago
Used them for paging/escalation systems (VictorOps, Pagerduty). Agree with all you wrote though, these are very niche use cases.
StavrosK 8y ago
I use OneSignal on my blog (https://www.stavros.io/ https://www.stavros.io/), which shows a small bell on the bottom right. If you click the bell, you get prompted to enable notifications for new articles. Quite a few people have done that, as it's pretty convenient if you want to be notified of new content.
- naikrovek 8y ago
  Thank you for tying that to a user action, and not page load.
  - StavrosK 8y ago
    OneSignal does have that option, which I find supremely annoying. They should just take that out and always require you to click on the bell before triggering the notification. Hopefully, with this browser change, they will.
djsumdog 8y ago
Looking at my permissions, it'd only Mastodon/Pleroma instances and chat. The other 80~90% of sites that request permissions are blocked. The most annoying are news/blog sites. Who the hell actually clicks Allow? Like 1%? 2%?
- tendencydriven 8y ago
  I'd imagine a lot more than 1-2%. Watching my Father use his phone the other day and he just says yes to every single thing that pops up without reading it first. I imagine a lot of the older generation are like that.
- jacurtis 8y ago
  According to the article, overall acceptance rate on the notifications popup is 3%. But that will include legitimate notification requests like Gmail, Discord, Slack, etc.. That also includes people that just randomly accept any notification their computer gives them. This is older people who don't understand the specific permissions they are granting. There was one time I was clicking on a navigation element right as a popup for notifications popped up and i accidently clicked it. I immediately went in and reverse the permission to block access, but I am sure there are use cases of accidental acceptance as well. So considering all of that. My guess is that real intentional adoption is below 1%.
  - efreak 8y ago
    This is an occasional problem I've had on multiple platforms (Android/Windows OS, browser UI, ZoneAlarm way back when, etc). Why is it not yet a thing to ignore the first click within 50-100ms or so of a dialog popping up? Especially on desktop where you can find out if the cursor was already in place before the pop-up showed.
Improvotter 8y ago
I wish GitHub had web push notifications. I'm happy that Reddit has them, but they barely work to be honest. Sometimes it seems to work, most of the times it just doesn't.
- naikrovek 8y ago
  GitHub has an API which you can use to subscribe to them. I know that's not what you're asking for, but it's something to build upon.
  - Improvotter 8y ago
    I know and I've been thinking about making it. Though I feel like it's not worth it. I would rather spend my time working on something that other people can use as well. I don't think many people are interested in a small app that only does GitHub notifications.
mssngrtrn 8y ago
> Serious question though: has anyone here ever used the notifications for anything other than web based IM (slack, whatsapp)? I'm building a tool that uses browser notifications to ping when something new is created. It only asks for permission, when a user clicks the button which is clearly labeled to "setup browser notifications". It also sends only 1! notification until the browser tab is opened again, to not spam.
Klathmon 8y ago
I have a self-hosted home automation platform with a web UI that uses web notifications for tons of things around the house (for example, a notification shows up on my device if the front-door camera notices my face, and the notification has 2 actions I can take right from the notification: "Turn on the outside lights" and "unlock the front door"). I also have it enabled for a website that sends out notifications when they go live for their podcast, the google play music site has them enabled for me to show song titles and album art when the song changes, and Circle-CI has them turned on for when builds pass/fail, but for some reason that one only works when I have the tab open... That being said, i'm more than happy with this new UI! It's easy enough to find that sites can implement directions for users to go enable it if they want, and it's not in everyone's face for every news site that spams asking for it.
corben 8y ago
We use them at https://hund.io https://hund.io for notifying of a change on a status page (we're a status page provider). Users have to subscribe to push in order to be prompted by the browser for permission.
pastullo 8y ago
I agree with you sooooooo much! Those popups are extremely annoying and mostly used on useless SEO blog traps. The whole notification UI should be much less prominent. If you really want to enable those notification, they should let you opt-in
EamonnMR 8y ago
Judging from the responses, I think the reason is that browser vendors want browsers to stay relevant in a world of Apps.
GordonS 8y ago
Nope, IM is my only use case too. It's actually really irritating the number of random websites that immediately popup an obtrusive notification prompt - I can only guess that they are hoping people accidentally click on the wrong button, and don't know how to disable it...
kamarg 8y ago
I've used it for letting customers know that artwork is ready for approval on a custom printing site. We give them the option of notification between email, text, and browser notification and our artists average creating a proof for approval in under an hour. Last time I checked, we have about 5% of people opt for browser notification only which is higher than I expected.
jsight 8y ago
The issue is that people will overlook it on IM sites now and then complain that there is no way to get notifications without an app. So, the browser vendors worked around this by making it prominent. I think the interface was actually pretty reasonable for these legitimate use cases. Unfortunately, reasonable tools that capture traffic will always be abused.
alex_duf 8y ago
Our deployment tool at work sends you a notification if the deployment failed
jacurtis 8y ago
Gmail and G-Suite (professoinal Gmail) allow useful notifications. But those notifications only popup while a Gmail tab is open (such as in the background or not visible). So I like to open gmail while I am waiting for an email, I will get the notifications, can read the email, then close that tab and notifications are no longer arriving. One of the very few use cases for notifications that I appreciate. I have the same setup for Slack & Discord online versions.
chewbacha 8y ago
I use it for calendar notifications.
13of40 8y ago
I clicked "accept" on about half a dozen of these from news sites sometime back just to see what would happen and I never got any alerts. I suspect sites enable it just because their news platform has a checkbox for it, then never send anything out because the acceptance rate is so low (or it would take more effort than checking a box).
codedokode 8y ago
I would not like to use notifications for anything, including IM. Sometimes I get a lot of messages and I don't want them to distract me all the day. A better idea is just to highlight the program in the task bar, as Windows XP did. In this case you can view the messages when it is convenient for you.
_alastair 8y ago
I was part of a team that used web notifications as an experiment in sending live election results to people's devices: https://medium.com/the-guardian-mobile-innovation-lab/generating-images-in-javascript-without-using-the-canvas-api-77f3f4355fad https://medium.com/the-guardian-mobile-innovation-lab/genera... It's a pretty fascinating feature set. You can attach images, update the content of an existing notification, attach buttons to perform custom actions, choose to make it silent or not... I think there is more utility than most implementations in the wild would suggest. One fascinating aspect of it for me is that you can do very time limited things (e.g. send election results) - users might be reluctant to download an entire app just for one evening of updates, but being able to send notification through the browser sidesteps that entirely (and more broadly, it puts a useful tool in the hands of people who can't afford native development). That said, I agree that it's total madness that the default UI allows you to ask for permission on page load. We always had the prompt behind a button on the page and it worked great, so I think Mozilla have the right idea here.
chrisjc 8y ago
Yes, calendar apps like google calendar. Push applications like Pushbullet for Android. But I think your point remains... there are only a few good reasons for notifications.
howard941 8y ago
At least one forum uses them to notice followup posts https://devzone.nordicsemi.com https://devzone.nordicsemi.com . It's redundant in that the forum can be told to notice by email.
muricula 8y ago
lichess, a chess website, uses them so you can tab away while waiting for a game to start.
jdofaz 8y ago
gitlab and some internal sites
rjmunro 8y ago
I use them for following YouTube channels that I like. I suspect many people would do this.

by LeonM 8y ago

nkrisc 8y ago

I've seen some sites that do long tasks use them to alert you when the task is finished, so you can do something else while waiting and not miss when it finishes.

vasco 8y ago

Used them for paging/escalation systems (VictorOps, Pagerduty). Agree with all you wrote though, these are very niche use cases.

StavrosK 8y ago

I use OneSignal on my blog (https://www.stavros.io/ https://www.stavros.io/), which shows a small bell on the bottom right. If you click the bell, you get prompted to enable notifications for new articles. Quite a few people have done that, as it's pretty convenient if you want to be notified of new content.

naikrovek 8y ago
Thank you for tying that to a user action, and not page load.
- StavrosK 8y ago
  OneSignal does have that option, which I find supremely annoying. They should just take that out and always require you to click on the bell before triggering the notification. Hopefully, with this browser change, they will.

djsumdog 8y ago

Looking at my permissions, it'd only Mastodon/Pleroma instances and chat. The other 80~90% of sites that request permissions are blocked. The most annoying are news/blog sites. Who the hell actually clicks Allow? Like 1%? 2%?

tendencydriven 8y ago
I'd imagine a lot more than 1-2%. Watching my Father use his phone the other day and he just says yes to every single thing that pops up without reading it first. I imagine a lot of the older generation are like that.
jacurtis 8y ago
According to the article, overall acceptance rate on the notifications popup is 3%. But that will include legitimate notification requests like Gmail, Discord, Slack, etc.. That also includes people that just randomly accept any notification their computer gives them. This is older people who don't understand the specific permissions they are granting. There was one time I was clicking on a navigation element right as a popup for notifications popped up and i accidently clicked it. I immediately went in and reverse the permission to block access, but I am sure there are use cases of accidental acceptance as well. So considering all of that. My guess is that real intentional adoption is below 1%.
- efreak 8y ago
  This is an occasional problem I've had on multiple platforms (Android/Windows OS, browser UI, ZoneAlarm way back when, etc). Why is it not yet a thing to ignore the first click within 50-100ms or so of a dialog popping up? Especially on desktop where you can find out if the cursor was already in place before the pop-up showed.

Improvotter 8y ago

I wish GitHub had web push notifications. I'm happy that Reddit has them, but they barely work to be honest. Sometimes it seems to work, most of the times it just doesn't.

naikrovek 8y ago
GitHub has an API which you can use to subscribe to them. I know that's not what you're asking for, but it's something to build upon.
- Improvotter 8y ago
  I know and I've been thinking about making it. Though I feel like it's not worth it. I would rather spend my time working on something that other people can use as well. I don't think many people are interested in a small app that only does GitHub notifications.

mssngrtrn 8y ago

> Serious question though: has anyone here ever used the notifications for anything other than web based IM (slack, whatsapp)? I'm building a tool that uses browser notifications to ping when something new is created. It only asks for permission, when a user clicks the button which is clearly labeled to "setup browser notifications". It also sends only 1! notification until the browser tab is opened again, to not spam.

Klathmon 8y ago

I have a self-hosted home automation platform with a web UI that uses web notifications for tons of things around the house (for example, a notification shows up on my device if the front-door camera notices my face, and the notification has 2 actions I can take right from the notification: "Turn on the outside lights" and "unlock the front door"). I also have it enabled for a website that sends out notifications when they go live for their podcast, the google play music site has them enabled for me to show song titles and album art when the song changes, and Circle-CI has them turned on for when builds pass/fail, but for some reason that one only works when I have the tab open... That being said, i'm more than happy with this new UI! It's easy enough to find that sites can implement directions for users to go enable it if they want, and it's not in everyone's face for every news site that spams asking for it.

corben 8y ago

We use them at https://hund.io https://hund.io for notifying of a change on a status page (we're a status page provider). Users have to subscribe to push in order to be prompted by the browser for permission.

pastullo 8y ago

I agree with you sooooooo much! Those popups are extremely annoying and mostly used on useless SEO blog traps. The whole notification UI should be much less prominent. If you really want to enable those notification, they should let you opt-in

EamonnMR 8y ago

Judging from the responses, I think the reason is that browser vendors want browsers to stay relevant in a world of Apps.

GordonS 8y ago

Nope, IM is my only use case too. It's actually really irritating the number of random websites that immediately popup an obtrusive notification prompt - I can only guess that they are hoping people accidentally click on the wrong button, and don't know how to disable it...

kamarg 8y ago

I've used it for letting customers know that artwork is ready for approval on a custom printing site. We give them the option of notification between email, text, and browser notification and our artists average creating a proof for approval in under an hour. Last time I checked, we have about 5% of people opt for browser notification only which is higher than I expected.

jsight 8y ago

The issue is that people will overlook it on IM sites now and then complain that there is no way to get notifications without an app. So, the browser vendors worked around this by making it prominent. I think the interface was actually pretty reasonable for these legitimate use cases. Unfortunately, reasonable tools that capture traffic will always be abused.

alex_duf 8y ago

Our deployment tool at work sends you a notification if the deployment failed

jacurtis 8y ago

Gmail and G-Suite (professoinal Gmail) allow useful notifications. But those notifications only popup while a Gmail tab is open (such as in the background or not visible). So I like to open gmail while I am waiting for an email, I will get the notifications, can read the email, then close that tab and notifications are no longer arriving. One of the very few use cases for notifications that I appreciate. I have the same setup for Slack & Discord online versions.

chewbacha 8y ago

I use it for calendar notifications.

13of40 8y ago

I clicked "accept" on about half a dozen of these from news sites sometime back just to see what would happen and I never got any alerts. I suspect sites enable it just because their news platform has a checkbox for it, then never send anything out because the acceptance rate is so low (or it would take more effort than checking a box).

codedokode 8y ago

I would not like to use notifications for anything, including IM. Sometimes I get a lot of messages and I don't want them to distract me all the day. A better idea is just to highlight the program in the task bar, as Windows XP did. In this case you can view the messages when it is convenient for you.

_alastair 8y ago

I was part of a team that used web notifications as an experiment in sending live election results to people's devices: https://medium.com/the-guardian-mobile-innovation-lab/generating-images-in-javascript-without-using-the-canvas-api-77f3f4355fad https://medium.com/the-guardian-mobile-innovation-lab/genera... It's a pretty fascinating feature set. You can attach images, update the content of an existing notification, attach buttons to perform custom actions, choose to make it silent or not... I think there is more utility than most implementations in the wild would suggest. One fascinating aspect of it for me is that you can do very time limited things (e.g. send election results) - users might be reluctant to download an entire app just for one evening of updates, but being able to send notification through the browser sidesteps that entirely (and more broadly, it puts a useful tool in the hands of people who can't afford native development). That said, I agree that it's total madness that the default UI allows you to ask for permission on page load. We always had the prompt behind a button on the page and it worked great, so I think Mozilla have the right idea here.

chrisjc 8y ago

Yes, calendar apps like google calendar. Push applications like Pushbullet for Android. But I think your point remains... there are only a few good reasons for notifications.

howard941 8y ago

At least one forum uses them to notice followup posts https://devzone.nordicsemi.com https://devzone.nordicsemi.com . It's redundant in that the forum can be told to notice by email.

muricula 8y ago

lichess, a chess website, uses them so you can tab away while waiting for a game to start.

jdofaz 8y ago

gitlab and some internal sites

rjmunro 8y ago

I use them for following YouTube channels that I like. I suspect many people would do this.