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Reducing Abusive Notification Content
- tedivm 6y agoDoes anyone find notifications to actually be useful? I don't think I have them enabled for any site.
- ars 6y agoI use them for email and chat websites. I've never turned them on for news types sites though.
- striking 6y agoThe lack of them in MobileSafari discourages any legitimate developers from building on them, imho.
- dantillberg 6y agoI appreciate notifications for web-based email and calendar applications.
- epx 6y agoIt is useful, but in 1 every 300 sites I visit, so the SNR is not good indeed.
- saagarjha 6y agoI have them on for chat apps that I run in the browser because their native client is Electron-based.
- Xylakant 6y agoI have them enabled for a few chat and email interfaces that I use in the browser only.
- 1123581321 6y agoI like them for Trello, which is our project communication system at work. Trello has native apps, but they’re in poor condition. Standard browser sessions with notifications seem to work better.
- MatthewMcDonald 6y agoI use them for my GitLab pipelines
- iaml 6y agoGitlab pipeline succeeded notification is the only one I find helpful.
- tgsovlerkhgsel 6y agoYes, in very, very narrow cases: - Gmail - Calendar - Online support chats where I get a notification when an agent becomes available/responds so I don't forget about the tab - A custom tool I wrote for myself (web notifications are the easiest way to get push notifications onto your phone without having to go through the overhead of full app development) I bet there are some people who genuinely like the idea of a news site pushing them the latest news. I doubt they outweigh the number who accidentally enable those notifications and then can't turn them off, but I haven't seen user studies and I could be wrong; average users often have habits that seem weird to me. I have, however, also seen what really abusive notifications can do: A friend enabled notifications from a shady site or the ads served on the shady site (because users don't understand dialogs and end up clicking a random button, so ask them often enough and one of the clicks will land on "yes"), and now their Chromebook was telling them that they have a virus and need to {install a malicious extension,give the scammer money,etc.}. Since then, disabling notifications is on my mental "browser hardening for when I set up a browser for inexperienced users" checklist. I'd wholeheartedly support blocking the notification dialog for all sites, limiting notifications to a barely-noticeable icon that the user needs to actively click. Much harder to convince a user to take an action than to convince a user to click a random button to get rid of a dialog that's getting in their face. Also, an easy browser-controlled way to unsubscribe from notifications, and enforcement based on the rates of a) people clicking "no" in the permission dialog, b) unsubscribe rates. If the metrics show that your users aren't happy with your notifications, no more notifications for you.
- geofft 6y agoI use the Slack website instead of the native app because I don't really see a need for having more native apps that are just glorified website wrappers, and they're useful there.
- josephcsible 6y agoHere's another idea for this: how about a "stealth deny" button that will tell the website that you allowed notifications, but not actually show them to you?
- ars 6y agoWould that actually work? Don't notifications cause your browser to communicate regularly, in the background, with the site? Would you actually want your browser doing that?
- gruez 6y ago> Would that actually work? Don't notifications cause your browser to communicate regularly, in the background, with the site? no, communication is done through a push provider.
- Nextgrid 6y agoNot regularly, but during the initial permissions prompt the website is told whether you've accepted it or not. Granted, I've personally never seen a website that outright refuses to work with notifications disabled so I'm not sure whether there's value in this.
- josephcsible 6y ago> I've personally never seen a website that outright refuses to work with notifications disabled The example in the linked article is a site that covers the page with a gray box and an arrow pointing at the notification request, labeled "Click ‘Allow’ to enter!"
- Isthatablackgsd 6y ago> Granted, I've personally never seen a website that outright refuses to work with notifications disabled so I'm not sure whether there's value in this. I do. I encountered a few sites that outright refused to function with the notification disabled. Only way for those site to work is to accept the notification. There are value to have a silent notification or fake acceptance.
- batrat 6y agoI disabled js on my mobile browser. Life is much better
- saagarjha 6y agoNow, if only we could do something about the fake "allow notifications" pop-up that websites throw up these days…
- gitpusher 6y agoWhy are web notifications even a thing?
- cblconfederate 6y agofor the same reason SPAs are a thing, because ppl are jealous of mobile apps.
- cblconfederate 6y agoI think all these systems end up being abused and users just stop paying attention to them. The reason is, google doesn't have a vested interest in notifications being great. Facebook didn't either when they had their platform, so it was full of spam and ended up being useless. I think the same is happening with browser notifications. Mobile notifications seem to be going on the same path of saturating. What i find more useful is to have the notifications in-page. If the user wants to keep a tab open, they ll hear a beep when something interesting happens.
- everdrive 6y agoHere’s a better idea. Remove the notification feature entirely. Don’t disable it. Remove it. Its loss would improve the internet.
- ericye16 6y agoI think this is overly broad. If I have a chat webapp open, I would like a notification rather than having to manually poll it for new messages or missing messages.
- kordlessagain 6y agoA plugin works for notification.
- rapind 6y agoIt could be a useful feature, but marketing ruined it, just like everything else web related.
- temp667 6y agoI use a web based phone services so I do like it in some contexts. Inbound calls ring up more visibly this way.
- throw_m239339 6y agoNo it's useful, however it's has been incredibly abused by bad actors, marketing corps, spammers and co who sell their notification channels to third parties and is basically used as an AD pop up.
- EamonnMR 6y ago> Although notifications on the web are useful for a variety of applications The notification nag modal has been a scourge since it was introduced. They admit as much here: > Abusive notification prompts are one of the top user complaints we receive about Chrome. These always should have been opt in or user-initiated only, never should have been allowable as a modal prompt when landing on a page.
- hombre_fatal 6y agoThis seems like an obvious fix. Mobile browsers already have solutions where prompts/sounds/playback can only be initiated inside a click/interaction handler. I don't see why it can't be the same here.
- notriddle 6y agoDesktop browsers have it, too, at least for opening popup windows and unmuting audio. Site owners work around it by coaxing the user into clicking a button that opens the prompt, with a label that says it does something else. The popup window situation has gotten so bad that even websites that legitimately want popups have stopped using them, because it's such a PITA to get them to reliably open.
- willcipriano 6y agoI played around with this previously. For playing audio the "button" can be a invisible div that takes up the entire page and interacting with it can be not only clicking but simply moving the mouse over the div.
- temp667 6y agoAbsolutely - I auto deny reflexively, and probably miss out on notifcations I want. It's weird - cookie popups (I can browse incognito or clear cookies or use an extension to control my own cookies) and the notification popup I found similarly annoying. Just let me browse and control my browsing on my own terms. In the website text it can ask that I go into a notifications whitelist panel and add a url that can send notifications, or click on an element that triggers the pop-up etc. Similarly, we keep on hearing these headlines about someone not having the right cookie popups or enough of them etc. I wish those would go away as well. The place to control cookies is with the user. I'm not sure disabling cookies even hides my activities from a site (obviously it doesn't).
- Lammy 6y agoIt really bothers me to see the very serious and very subjective word “abusive” used objectively here like I’m expected to agree with 100% of Google’s criteria.
- dec0dedab0de 6y agothere should just be a plugin that tracks bad behavior and completely blackholes any sites that partake in it.