10 ms·

I know I'm a bit tangential, but what are some actually useful examples of push notifications for browsers? Every time I've seen them in action was with spam/c

by mihaic 4y ago

I know I'm a bit tangential, but what are some actually useful examples of push notifications for browsers? Every time I've seen them in action was with spam/clickbait, after someone accidentally subscribed and couldn't remove it.

tehlike 4y ago
I am working on a pwa for android/chrome extension for desktop that would let users know if the price of an item they were watching drops. If you assumed pwa, you can see why they are useful. Also if slack were mobile friendly, i could see notifications being helpful there too
simion314 4y ago
You could run Slack or Discord in browser instead of an application, then notifications could be used exactly as for the apps.
- thayne 4y ago
  Which is what I do in Firefox, which has supported this for a long time.
swatcoder 4y ago
All the same things they’re useful for in apps (which are also prone to spam/clickbait). Web push is a prerequisite for moving a ton of apps out of app stores and into the platform agnostic thin client model of the web: messaging clients, timers, background tasks, transaction/shipping status updates, trading tools, etc
- scarface74 4y ago
  You mean making them worse?
  - ben174 4y ago
    You mean not installing yet another application and having another icon on my homescreen for every freaking website I visit? And these apps almost have no need to run any native code or do anything a website can't handle in modern day. Yes. I'm all for it. Let's make browsers more capable.
    - scarface74 4y ago
      Even simple apps like banking apps, AirBnB, and even Papa Johns are more responsive than their websites
      - aaaaaaaaata 4y ago
        That's because they're bad devs, not because webapps are inferior.
        scarface74 4y ago
        The “No True Scotsman” Defense. Or maybe it’s because either cross platform web apps are never as good as mobile apps or that the entire web development ecosystem is a clusterfuck of dependency hell, security vulnerabilities in dependencies, complexity, and “ooh shiny” new framework of the week?
    - HWR_14 4y ago
      Have you thought about not installing the apps and just using the website? I have yet to see a website where I wanted to install the app to view it, and have no idea what features would make me want to do that.
      - ben174 4y ago
        Have you not enountered sites that app-wall you? Sites with useful content, such as Reddit - not allowing you to view the user-generated content unless you install their app? It sucks - but it exists.
- esrauch 4y ago
  Although apps also send junk push notifications, it seems like websites are drastically worse in terms of push notifications. The reason is just that I visit many more websites only once and expect no ongoing relationship with them: that means that I am much less likely to want their notifications AND they are much more likely to want me to have notifications AND they have less to lose by being spammy. Apps can assume higher organic revisits and also being too spammy can result in the downside of the me the app. A website I had no plan to revisit has no punishment for attempting not spam.
- HWR_14 4y ago
  > Web push is a prerequisite for moving a ton of apps out of app stores and into the platform agnostic thin client model of the web Why would I want to turn my powerful computer into a thin client where I don't have my own software?
fuzzy2 4y ago
What I know and appreciate: Notifications for replies on forums, chats and web mail, notifications about CI pipeline status on GitLab.
morepork 4y ago
Push notifications are useful in browsers in all the same places they are useful in mobile apps. Note that browser push notifications also work on mobile, so you don't need to install an app to get real time alerts. For example: - Sites with chat can send you messages even if you don't have the tab open (or even browser in some cases) - Online game e.g. board game or chess can push to you when it's your move. - Home alerts, e.g. that your garage door has been opened Sure there are a lot of spammy notifications, e.g. sales alerts, news items, etc. that most people probably don't want, but there are genuinely useful use cases.
- starik36 4y ago
  > chess Perfect for lichess when my mind wonders and I switch to something else.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- olliej 4y ago
  I turn off/no to push notifications on every app that has ever asked for it, except Messaging and Calendar. Nothing else I've ever installed has warranted more than a little red notification dot on the icon.
  - airstrike 4y ago
    This is the way. In addition to those, I have a silent e-mail count badge for Gmail and WSJ news alerts (because they are tangentially relevant for my job)
  - adamredwoods 4y ago
    Why cannot it be automatically "no" for all push notifications? A website should not even be allowed to ask me. MS Teams already gives me a lot of push notifications during my work day, and if the browsers starts to do this, I will be overwhelmed with beeping nag-notifications. Computer clutter is a distraction and lowers productivity.
airza 4y ago
It would be nice if mobile browsers had push notifications in IOS because it would make it possible to have browser based mobile apps with some chance of feature parity.
- jtbayly 4y ago
  They announced it is coming.
anvuong 4y ago
Agree, I've never found browser notification useful.
micromacrofoot 4y ago
You can run apps in the browser instead of giving them all sorts of device permissions. Essentially web apps will finally have something close to parity with on-device apps.
sidlls 4y ago
Every comment suggesting it brings browsers closer to feature parity with apps is a great argument against the feature. Browsers aren't operating systems. Stop trying to make them be that. It has been a terrible disaster so far, and likely will continue to be going forward, given the lingua franca of development in browsers and all the terrible development practices that have grown up around it.
- hamandcheese 4y ago
  The web is our only hope to not pay Apple/Google 15-30% of all digital commerce. Reaching parity with native apps is crucial.
  - scarface74 4y ago
    None of the current messaging apps require or even support in app purchases. So the argument about paying anyone 30% is moot.
    - randomtwiddler 4y ago
      Kind of a narrow view. Not all of us who want this are building messaging apps.
      - scarface74 4y ago
        So what type of app are you writing that has to accept in app purchases and are push notifications the only thing stopping you from having a much worse web app than a native app?
        randomtwiddler 4y ago
        Why does a native app have to be better than a web app? Quite the assumption. The snark keeps me from even wanting to engage you...
        4y ago
dnndev 4y ago
Probably 90% of the things that currently use SMS. Carriers keep hiking fees for sms, so this is a natural path for Devs.
- scarface74 4y ago
  Carriers in the US charging for SMS? That hasn’t been a thing for years.
  - dnndev 4y ago
    Sure they do. Just ask twilio or nexmo. I get billed every month for sending sms from my app (pass thru carrier fees)
    - scarface74 4y ago
      You mean sending SMS as an app developer. Makes sense
      - dnndev 4y ago
        Yep, once this feature is available on mobile - will increase our profit by 40% easily.
        jaxn 4y ago
        Absolutely. Especially with all the additional fees carriers are tacking on these days under the guise of reducing spam.
        scarface74 4y ago
        Or people will get so inundated with spammy notifications on websites asking for permission to send notifications they will just disable them globally (like I will).
zitterbewegung 4y ago
When I use Google Collab and I start a computation for an individual cell I will get a notification that the computation has finished.
brundolf 4y ago
I worked on a web app once where we used them to notify the user when a job they'd started was done. They've also been put to good use in email and calendar apps
bryans 4y ago
I'm not sure if it qualifies as useful, but a while back I hacked together a web push notifications site[1] for RPAN live streamers after Reddit ripped away in-site notifications. It didn't gain traction because the admins/mods banned and forbade me from speaking about it, and because I couldn't offer iOS notifications, but ~1,000 people still use it to get ~25,000 notifications every day. For the first several months, I was getting a message or email every day asking when iOS web push was coming, and the timing couldn't be more perfect that Reddit just effectively shut down their live streaming the same day that Apple finally enabled push. [1] https://rpan.me/live https://rpan.me/live
bpicolo 4y ago
Useful for calendar apps to notify of events honestly.
modeless 4y ago
I use them (optionally) in https://james.darpinian.com/satellites/ https://james.darpinian.com/satellites/ to remind you when a satellite is overhead.
jaxn 4y ago
Restaurant waitlist notifications. In-store pickup notifications. Travel notifications. Basically any situation that is some combination of in-person and online. Sure, you can build and maintain an app and then force people to install it to receive notifications. Or you can use/abuse SMS and force people to give their (highly targetable) cellphone number. But both of those alternatives cost more and are less consumer-friendly.
paulgb 4y ago
I run a free service[1] that lets you relay messages to a WebPush notification by hitting an HTTPS endpoint. It was originally intended for tracking the progress of ML training jobs, but people have used it for notifying themselves when event tickets became available, tracking prices, getting events from Raspberry Pi home automation devices, etc. I’m glad it’s finally coming to iOS! [1] https://notify.run https://notify.run
usrn 4y ago
So we can have open source chat apps again. Only organizations can publish chat apps for the app store and it's resulted in a massive regression in IM app quality over the past decade.
- dmitriid 4y ago
  You can, and still do have, opensource chat apps, and in app stores, too.
  - usrn 4y ago
    No, not in a useful way. Either they're not free (which matters when setting up group chats) or they don't have reliable push notifications (because only the group publishing the app can maintain the push infrastructure (which is required) and no one is paying them and it's a lot of work.) It is actually completely fucked. I've looked into dealing with it myself. Apple has pretty much single-handedly destroyed internet IM. Hopefully this starts to undo the damage.
    - dmitriid 4y ago
      > Apple has pretty much single-handedly destroyed internet IM That's a bold claim when looks at dozens of messaging apps and hundreds of billions of messages sent daily
      - usrn 4y ago
        Yeah they're almost all siloed or they have the problems I've mentioned. The way Apple has decided app architecture must work forces this on everyone. I've spent a bunch of time (way more than I would have liked) looking into this and I've had this exact same discussion a dozen different times. EDIT: I'm out of comment quota. Being open source hardly matters if the app is siloed. There's no reason we shouldn't be able to have decent XMPP and IRC clients other than Apple jerking their users around. (and before you bitch at me about leaving a socket open for push notifications using up battery, no. That's what the OS is already doing, it suspends the machine without closing the socket and reopens it if it's dead after the next wakeup.)
thrdbndndn 4y ago
I use the same ones as my phone, mainly SNS. YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, etc.
miguel-muniz 4y ago
To be fair, even smartphone apps these days will send you BS notifications. Shopping apps will ping you throughout the day with "recommended" products, ride share apps will ask you to ride with them during the holidays, social apps will ask you to checkout the newest trend. All sad attempts to get you to open their app. The worst is when apps don't even let you opt out, so you either get useful notifications and advertisements or nothing.
jeroenhd 4y ago
My use cases: - Home Assistant - Discord - Telegram - Element - Buienalarm (weather app) - RSS reader - Floatplane.com - Several sites/forums with comment sections, to notify me of replies etc. - Gitlab pipeline notifications - Some smaller services I'm probably forgetting Basically, anything but the scammy sites that try to force notifications upon you. Generally interactive stuff which I feel shouldn't have a 300MB app with access to file systems (and there's not a lot that _really_ needs an app these days). To combat the blogspam from Google searches, HN/Reddit links, and whatever else tries to shove stuff down my throat, I have notifications disabled by default so I don't even see the prompts; I manually toggle them on, and I think that should be the default. I also close any website the second I see a popup for newsletters, notifications, or even cookie popups the second they block my reading, unless I can't find the information I need anywhere else.
shados 4y ago
The primary use is convincing the marketing department that maybe we don't actually need to build a native app just for push notifications. Joke aside, it allows PWAs to more fully replace native apps, which is great.
hampereddustbin 4y ago
Personally I've found notifications to be really useful for applications which I don't want to install from external sources, but must still use for work. These include MS-teams, slack, rocket, Whapps, GMail.
o_m 4y ago
I work on a lot of conference and festival web sites, where there are multiple stages and events going on at the same time. We can do pretty much everything in the browser, and the users are happy with not having to download an app. The only thing that has made us look into native development is to have push notifications. Our clients wants to send push notifications if an event is delayed or if an event is at another stage, after being changed last minute, which happens pretty often.
littlecranky67 4y ago
> Every time I've seen them in action was with spam/clickbait, after someone accidentally subscribed and couldn't remove it. I think this is the reason Apple is reluctant to add it. There are very valid reasons why a user would opt to receive web-push notifications, but its mostly niche apps/usages. The vast majority of push authorization banners are from sites you visit for the first time, with hardly any engagement or interaction nor clear intention of allowing web-push ("We think you want unsolicited notifications because it is better for our business model") While there is no fix for dark-pattern usage of web-push, browsers and OS UX must make it super easy to withdraw notification consent anytime.
quitit 4y ago
I think it's been well answered, but I feel it's a meaningful technology if web apps are to be a real consideration. There's an over-reliance on email being a notification tool, with plenty of examples such as social media sites which utterly abuse it. The difference for me is straightforward: Email is for messages the user might want to keep, notifications are messages that the user doesn't need to keep. (To extend this further, messaging systems aren't for notifications either, but rather for interactive dialogue.)
butz 4y ago
Twitch notifications when streamer you follow comes online.

by mihaic 4y ago

tehlike 4y ago

I am working on a pwa for android/chrome extension for desktop that would let users know if the price of an item they were watching drops. If you assumed pwa, you can see why they are useful. Also if slack were mobile friendly, i could see notifications being helpful there too

simion314 4y ago

You could run Slack or Discord in browser instead of an application, then notifications could be used exactly as for the apps.

thayne 4y ago
Which is what I do in Firefox, which has supported this for a long time.

swatcoder 4y ago

All the same things they’re useful for in apps (which are also prone to spam/clickbait). Web push is a prerequisite for moving a ton of apps out of app stores and into the platform agnostic thin client model of the web: messaging clients, timers, background tasks, transaction/shipping status updates, trading tools, etc

scarface74 4y ago
You mean making them worse?
- ben174 4y ago
  You mean not installing yet another application and having another icon on my homescreen for every freaking website I visit? And these apps almost have no need to run any native code or do anything a website can't handle in modern day. Yes. I'm all for it. Let's make browsers more capable.
  - scarface74 4y ago
    Even simple apps like banking apps, AirBnB, and even Papa Johns are more responsive than their websites
    - aaaaaaaaata 4y ago
      That's because they're bad devs, not because webapps are inferior.
      - scarface74 4y ago
        The “No True Scotsman” Defense. Or maybe it’s because either cross platform web apps are never as good as mobile apps or that the entire web development ecosystem is a clusterfuck of dependency hell, security vulnerabilities in dependencies, complexity, and “ooh shiny” new framework of the week?
  - HWR_14 4y ago
    Have you thought about not installing the apps and just using the website? I have yet to see a website where I wanted to install the app to view it, and have no idea what features would make me want to do that.
    - ben174 4y ago
      Have you not enountered sites that app-wall you? Sites with useful content, such as Reddit - not allowing you to view the user-generated content unless you install their app? It sucks - but it exists.
esrauch 4y ago
Although apps also send junk push notifications, it seems like websites are drastically worse in terms of push notifications. The reason is just that I visit many more websites only once and expect no ongoing relationship with them: that means that I am much less likely to want their notifications AND they are much more likely to want me to have notifications AND they have less to lose by being spammy. Apps can assume higher organic revisits and also being too spammy can result in the downside of the me the app. A website I had no plan to revisit has no punishment for attempting not spam.
HWR_14 4y ago
> Web push is a prerequisite for moving a ton of apps out of app stores and into the platform agnostic thin client model of the web Why would I want to turn my powerful computer into a thin client where I don't have my own software?

fuzzy2 4y ago

What I know and appreciate: Notifications for replies on forums, chats and web mail, notifications about CI pipeline status on GitLab.

morepork 4y ago

Push notifications are useful in browsers in all the same places they are useful in mobile apps. Note that browser push notifications also work on mobile, so you don't need to install an app to get real time alerts. For example: - Sites with chat can send you messages even if you don't have the tab open (or even browser in some cases) - Online game e.g. board game or chess can push to you when it's your move. - Home alerts, e.g. that your garage door has been opened Sure there are a lot of spammy notifications, e.g. sales alerts, news items, etc. that most people probably don't want, but there are genuinely useful use cases.

starik36 4y ago
> chess Perfect for lichess when my mind wonders and I switch to something else.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
olliej 4y ago
I turn off/no to push notifications on every app that has ever asked for it, except Messaging and Calendar. Nothing else I've ever installed has warranted more than a little red notification dot on the icon.
- airstrike 4y ago
  This is the way. In addition to those, I have a silent e-mail count badge for Gmail and WSJ news alerts (because they are tangentially relevant for my job)
- adamredwoods 4y ago
  Why cannot it be automatically "no" for all push notifications? A website should not even be allowed to ask me. MS Teams already gives me a lot of push notifications during my work day, and if the browsers starts to do this, I will be overwhelmed with beeping nag-notifications. Computer clutter is a distraction and lowers productivity.

airza 4y ago

It would be nice if mobile browsers had push notifications in IOS because it would make it possible to have browser based mobile apps with some chance of feature parity.

jtbayly 4y ago
They announced it is coming.

anvuong 4y ago

Agree, I've never found browser notification useful.

micromacrofoot 4y ago

You can run apps in the browser instead of giving them all sorts of device permissions. Essentially web apps will finally have something close to parity with on-device apps.

sidlls 4y ago

Every comment suggesting it brings browsers closer to feature parity with apps is a great argument against the feature. Browsers aren't operating systems. Stop trying to make them be that. It has been a terrible disaster so far, and likely will continue to be going forward, given the lingua franca of development in browsers and all the terrible development practices that have grown up around it.

hamandcheese 4y ago
The web is our only hope to not pay Apple/Google 15-30% of all digital commerce. Reaching parity with native apps is crucial.
- scarface74 4y ago
  None of the current messaging apps require or even support in app purchases. So the argument about paying anyone 30% is moot.
  - randomtwiddler 4y ago
    Kind of a narrow view. Not all of us who want this are building messaging apps.
    - scarface74 4y ago
      So what type of app are you writing that has to accept in app purchases and are push notifications the only thing stopping you from having a much worse web app than a native app?
      - randomtwiddler 4y ago
        Why does a native app have to be better than a web app? Quite the assumption. The snark keeps me from even wanting to engage you...
        4y ago

dnndev 4y ago

Probably 90% of the things that currently use SMS. Carriers keep hiking fees for sms, so this is a natural path for Devs.

scarface74 4y ago
Carriers in the US charging for SMS? That hasn’t been a thing for years.
- dnndev 4y ago
  Sure they do. Just ask twilio or nexmo. I get billed every month for sending sms from my app (pass thru carrier fees)
  - scarface74 4y ago
    You mean sending SMS as an app developer. Makes sense
    - dnndev 4y ago
      Yep, once this feature is available on mobile - will increase our profit by 40% easily.
      - jaxn 4y ago
        Absolutely. Especially with all the additional fees carriers are tacking on these days under the guise of reducing spam.
      - scarface74 4y ago
        Or people will get so inundated with spammy notifications on websites asking for permission to send notifications they will just disable them globally (like I will).

zitterbewegung 4y ago

When I use Google Collab and I start a computation for an individual cell I will get a notification that the computation has finished.

brundolf 4y ago

I worked on a web app once where we used them to notify the user when a job they'd started was done. They've also been put to good use in email and calendar apps

bryans 4y ago

I'm not sure if it qualifies as useful, but a while back I hacked together a web push notifications site[1] for RPAN live streamers after Reddit ripped away in-site notifications. It didn't gain traction because the admins/mods banned and forbade me from speaking about it, and because I couldn't offer iOS notifications, but ~1,000 people still use it to get ~25,000 notifications every day. For the first several months, I was getting a message or email every day asking when iOS web push was coming, and the timing couldn't be more perfect that Reddit just effectively shut down their live streaming the same day that Apple finally enabled push. [1] https://rpan.me/live https://rpan.me/live

bpicolo 4y ago

Useful for calendar apps to notify of events honestly.

modeless 4y ago

I use them (optionally) in https://james.darpinian.com/satellites/ https://james.darpinian.com/satellites/ to remind you when a satellite is overhead.

jaxn 4y ago

Restaurant waitlist notifications. In-store pickup notifications. Travel notifications. Basically any situation that is some combination of in-person and online. Sure, you can build and maintain an app and then force people to install it to receive notifications. Or you can use/abuse SMS and force people to give their (highly targetable) cellphone number. But both of those alternatives cost more and are less consumer-friendly.

paulgb 4y ago

I run a free service[1] that lets you relay messages to a WebPush notification by hitting an HTTPS endpoint. It was originally intended for tracking the progress of ML training jobs, but people have used it for notifying themselves when event tickets became available, tracking prices, getting events from Raspberry Pi home automation devices, etc. I’m glad it’s finally coming to iOS! [1] https://notify.run https://notify.run

usrn 4y ago

So we can have open source chat apps again. Only organizations can publish chat apps for the app store and it's resulted in a massive regression in IM app quality over the past decade.

dmitriid 4y ago
You can, and still do have, opensource chat apps, and in app stores, too.
- usrn 4y ago
  No, not in a useful way. Either they're not free (which matters when setting up group chats) or they don't have reliable push notifications (because only the group publishing the app can maintain the push infrastructure (which is required) and no one is paying them and it's a lot of work.) It is actually completely fucked. I've looked into dealing with it myself. Apple has pretty much single-handedly destroyed internet IM. Hopefully this starts to undo the damage.
  - dmitriid 4y ago
    > Apple has pretty much single-handedly destroyed internet IM That's a bold claim when looks at dozens of messaging apps and hundreds of billions of messages sent daily
    - usrn 4y ago
      Yeah they're almost all siloed or they have the problems I've mentioned. The way Apple has decided app architecture must work forces this on everyone. I've spent a bunch of time (way more than I would have liked) looking into this and I've had this exact same discussion a dozen different times. EDIT: I'm out of comment quota. Being open source hardly matters if the app is siloed. There's no reason we shouldn't be able to have decent XMPP and IRC clients other than Apple jerking their users around. (and before you bitch at me about leaving a socket open for push notifications using up battery, no. That's what the OS is already doing, it suspends the machine without closing the socket and reopens it if it's dead after the next wakeup.)

thrdbndndn 4y ago

I use the same ones as my phone, mainly SNS. YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, etc.

miguel-muniz 4y ago

To be fair, even smartphone apps these days will send you BS notifications. Shopping apps will ping you throughout the day with "recommended" products, ride share apps will ask you to ride with them during the holidays, social apps will ask you to checkout the newest trend. All sad attempts to get you to open their app. The worst is when apps don't even let you opt out, so you either get useful notifications and advertisements or nothing.

jeroenhd 4y ago

My use cases: - Home Assistant - Discord - Telegram - Element - Buienalarm (weather app) - RSS reader - Floatplane.com - Several sites/forums with comment sections, to notify me of replies etc. - Gitlab pipeline notifications - Some smaller services I'm probably forgetting Basically, anything but the scammy sites that try to force notifications upon you. Generally interactive stuff which I feel shouldn't have a 300MB app with access to file systems (and there's not a lot that _really_ needs an app these days). To combat the blogspam from Google searches, HN/Reddit links, and whatever else tries to shove stuff down my throat, I have notifications disabled by default so I don't even see the prompts; I manually toggle them on, and I think that should be the default. I also close any website the second I see a popup for newsletters, notifications, or even cookie popups the second they block my reading, unless I can't find the information I need anywhere else.

shados 4y ago

The primary use is convincing the marketing department that maybe we don't actually need to build a native app just for push notifications. Joke aside, it allows PWAs to more fully replace native apps, which is great.

hampereddustbin 4y ago

Personally I've found notifications to be really useful for applications which I don't want to install from external sources, but must still use for work. These include MS-teams, slack, rocket, Whapps, GMail.

o_m 4y ago

I work on a lot of conference and festival web sites, where there are multiple stages and events going on at the same time. We can do pretty much everything in the browser, and the users are happy with not having to download an app. The only thing that has made us look into native development is to have push notifications. Our clients wants to send push notifications if an event is delayed or if an event is at another stage, after being changed last minute, which happens pretty often.

littlecranky67 4y ago

> Every time I've seen them in action was with spam/clickbait, after someone accidentally subscribed and couldn't remove it. I think this is the reason Apple is reluctant to add it. There are very valid reasons why a user would opt to receive web-push notifications, but its mostly niche apps/usages. The vast majority of push authorization banners are from sites you visit for the first time, with hardly any engagement or interaction nor clear intention of allowing web-push ("We think you want unsolicited notifications because it is better for our business model") While there is no fix for dark-pattern usage of web-push, browsers and OS UX must make it super easy to withdraw notification consent anytime.

quitit 4y ago

I think it's been well answered, but I feel it's a meaningful technology if web apps are to be a real consideration. There's an over-reliance on email being a notification tool, with plenty of examples such as social media sites which utterly abuse it. The difference for me is straightforward: Email is for messages the user might want to keep, notifications are messages that the user doesn't need to keep. (To extend this further, messaging systems aren't for notifications either, but rather for interactive dialogue.)

butz 4y ago

Twitch notifications when streamer you follow comes online.