The main difference between web push notifications and RSS is that as the name implies, notifications are pushed to you on the publisher's schedule, whereas you

The main difference between web push notifications and RSS is that as the name implies, notifications are pushed to you on the publisher's schedule, whereas you pull down RSS on your own schedule. Push has several advantages - one is background power consumption (less work for the device to just sit around and wait, vs constantly firing up the network and polling a server). Another is that you get your notifications in real-time. However, I think push is way overused. Think about all the notifications you receive (way too many, probably). How many of these did you really need to see immediately? An impending food delivery or Uber arrival, sure (but we could also just use phone calls and SMS for these geoimmediate use cases). Online chats, maybe some of them. CNN publishing "breaking news" that's probably wrong anyway because the event is 5 minutes old? Loan offer #257 from the PayPal app? No thanks. I'd much rather have the latter class of "notifications" batched up and pulled down once every hour or three, with no sound, vibration or visual interruption. RSS is actually a great solution for that and I think the mobile operating systems should have built it in from day one, with "harass me via beeping and shaking and pushing" as an escalated level of permission that apps need to request specifically. They didn't because no one is trying to develop user friendly experiences, not Google, not particularly Apple, least of all the people who have been building the browsers. There is a long history of large companies trying to cram push notifications down our throat, starting with Active Desktop and Active Channels in Internet Explorer 4.0. Publishers have wanted this since the dawn of personal computing, because their ultimate dream is to push advertising into your eyeballs without your explicit grant of permission. Apple, Google, and the people developing the modern Web platform have all failed utterly at preventing them. (Truth be told it has never been a priority, they have always focused on "empowering developers," which really means empowering the publishers that those developers work for.) With phones and garbage like the ads in the Windows 10 Start menu, they finally achieved their dream and we're living in their dystopia today.