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I don't like browser notifications, especially on mobile. Maybe it's me but there's no explicit place agreed upon between me and the browser where the browser

I don't like browser notifications, especially on mobile. Maybe it's me but there's no explicit place agreed upon between me and the browser where the browser says "if the site sends a notification, here is where it will be". Mobile is already bad enough where if you swipe a notification away, well I hope you remembered the icon and the bit of context that was on that notification. Browser notifications just make this worse. And then there's the whole "will I get a notification if the browser app is closed? What if I get a notification in the middle of the night, will I receive it in the morning? Will it continue to receive notifications if I restart my phone?" kind of questions. Maybe it all just works but I am very untrusting of the whole feature.

wruza 6y ago
Technically, webpush-enabled site starts a service on your phone (read on js service workers) that then asks a browser to accept notifications from some origin and sends permission credentials to that origin. Then it decides for every incoming notification if it is worth popping up (e.g. if a site is a chat and it is already on the screen, there is no need to spam with popups), or if it’s worth a new tab on tap/click, etc. It is a hassle to configure, but then it usually just works. I suspect that your browser has to be running anyway, because a service worker is just a restricted browser env. Push providers may have delayed delivery, at least there is a ttl field in a notification at server-side. Didn’t test that much and only used that in one project, but remote alpha users already reported missing notifications. I have no clue how to debug that, because it simply doesn’t happen (phone config seems okay).