Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Reducing notification permission prompt spam in Firefox

blog.nightly.mozilla.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 268 posts

Re: Reducing notification permission prompt spam in Firefox

#61

Post by joecool1029 »

bugmen0t wrote: post #27
joecool1029 wrote: post #5

god forbid you leave firefox set to never remember history, you don't get the option to block sites forever. So every time you hit a reddit link it will gleefully present you with a prompt about notification permissions.

That's not entirely true. Remembering history is also different from remembering permissions. Firefox should persist those independently from actual URLs in browsing history. And there's a button in settings where you can disable permission prompts for notifications globally.

> That's not entirely true. Remembering history is also different from remembering permissions.

Explain how it isn't true. I described a behavior with Firefox that's problematic and caused by 'automatic private browsing', which is what you get when you set 'never remember history'. When this is done it does not track state separately as you say.

Related: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1140700

Also, for more fun and unexpected behavior with that mode: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=513421

Re: Reducing notification permission prompt spam in Firefox

#62

Post by nindalf »

This “feature” is abused terribly around the web. For every site with useful notifications like gmail, there are 10 which misuse it. Yesterday I had the misfortune of misclicking on the prompt from a website. I started getting notifications like “YOUR COMPUTER IS INFECTED WITH A VIRUS”. Turning off notifications for that website took at least 4 clicks through Chrome settings. Good to know there is a setting to turn it off completely on Firefox. If I personally actually wanted notifications from a service, I’d install the mobile app.

Second, Mozilla seems to use telemetry data responsibly and well. Turning off notification prompts by default can’t possibly be done unless you have the data on acceptance rate on different types of prompts. If you’re making such decisions based on your intuition you’d likely get it wrong.

I ask the folks on HN who constantly criticise the collection of such telemetry, what did I lose as a user when Firefox collected this anonymised data? More importantly, how would you have made a decision here without the data? Intuition? (I’d request that no one reply with platitudes like “with enough data nothing is anonymous” and “you’re making a nothing-to-hide argument”)

Re: Reducing notification permission prompt spam in Firefox

#63

Post by anon12413 »

nindalf wrote: post #62

This “feature” is abused terribly around the web. For every site with useful notifications like gmail, there are 10 which misuse it. Yesterday I had the misfortune of misclicking on the prompt from a website. I started getting notifications like “YOUR COMPUTER IS INFECTED WITH A VIRUS”. Turning off notifications for that website took at least 4 clicks through Chrome settings. Good to know there is a setting to turn i…

You're making an assumption that their decision was based on data they collected. Not worth discussing data privacy with you over that-- they may have very well done simple user testing or done it on a whim of a few users that put a good case forward.

Re: Reducing notification permission prompt spam in Firefox

#64

Post by accatyyc »

nobrains wrote: post #34

There is one more reason why the acceptance rate of notification prompts is low (3%), other than the two points mentioned by Mozilla. THAT reason is that simply people do not want to be notified. They value their attention in these times of constantly being bombarded by attention seeking prompts, ads and notifications, that if asked, people surely chose not not being bombarded more.

I’d say Mozilla is right in their wording. Your point here is also included in that - if websites showed the push dialog responsibly, it would be for example in the website settings after the user checked a box called “send me push!”. Many good web services do it this way, and if done this way I suspect the accept rate is closer to 100%.

Some people might want push from news pages, but 97%+ don’t, so it makes no sense to request it immediately.

They probably even lose subscribers. Someone who read some content and liked it, decided that they want push may have already opted out because they didn’t know the site yet.

Re: Reducing notification permission prompt spam in Firefox

#65

Post by adrianmonk »

Someone1234 wrote: post #28
throwawayjava wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had no idea wth you were talking about until you mentioned Visual Studio Installer, then I knew immediately what you meant. This is a huge problem for Windows and Mac.

Open notepad. Press a key over and over. If the key-press stops going to notepad then focus has been transferred/stolen. Firefox's Notification Permission dialog has this behavior within the browser. For example go to Reddit or Facebook, start entering text, the notification permission dialog will appear, steal focus, and now your key-presses go into a black hole. The whole concept of focus-theft is an anti-pattern.…

Every time it happens, I feel like Charlie Brown trying to kick that football: https://peanuts.fandom.com/wiki/Football_gag

Re: Reducing notification permission prompt spam in Firefox

#67

Post by gsich »

nindalf wrote: post #62

This “feature” is abused terribly around the web. For every site with useful notifications like gmail, there are 10 which misuse it. Yesterday I had the misfortune of misclicking on the prompt from a website. I started getting notifications like “YOUR COMPUTER IS INFECTED WITH A VIRUS”. Turning off notifications for that website took at least 4 clicks through Chrome settings. Good to know there is a setting to turn i…

>I ask the folks on HN who constantly criticise the collection of such telemetry, what did I lose as a user when Firefox collected this anonymised data? More importantly, how would you have made a decision here without the data? Intuition? (I’d request that no one reply with platitudes like “with enough data nothing is anonymous” and “you’re making a nothing-to-hide argument”)

You don't need telemetry to find out that notifications get abused like that.

Re: Reducing notification permission prompt spam in Firefox

#69

Post by askvictor »

anon12413 wrote: post #63
nindalf wrote: post #62

This “feature” is abused terribly around the web. For every site with useful notifications like gmail, there are 10 which misuse it. Yesterday I had the misfortune of misclicking on the prompt from a website. I started getting notifications like “YOUR COMPUTER IS INFECTED WITH A VIRUS”. Turning off notifications for that website took at least 4 clicks through Chrome settings. Good to know there is a setting to turn i…

You're making an assumption that their decision was based on data they collected. Not worth discussing data privacy with you over that-- they may have very well done simple user testing or done it on a whim of a few users that put a good case forward.

From the article: > According to our telemetry data, the notifications prompt is by far the most frequently shown permission prompt, with about 18 million prompts shown on Firefox Beta in the month from Dec 25 2018 to Jan 24 2019. Not even 3% of these prompts got accepted by users.

The decision seems very clearly based on the collected data.

Re: Reducing notification permission prompt spam in Firefox

#70

Post by dreamcompiler »

amanzi wrote: post #37

Good work from Mozilla, but it won't help prevent those sites that pop up a HTML modal asking you to subscribe by email AND then a few seconds later pop up another HTML modal asking to send you notifications to keep you up to date AND then sliding in something from the bottom with "relevant" posts AND maybe also slide something else in from the top or sides with some other thing that just ends up blocking the content…

Don't forget the chatbot. "Wouldn't you like to ask me a question?" in a modal dialog that covers 25% of (what's left of) the content.

No. I don't want to ask you a question. You're a robot in the uncanny valley of English, and you're annoying me.

Thank goodness for the Kill Sticky bookmarklet. I could not surf without it nowadays.

Post reply on HN