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Reducing notification permission prompt spam in Firefox

blog.nightly.mozilla.org

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Re: Reducing notification permission prompt spam in Firefox

#71

Post by anon12413 »

askvictor wrote: post #69
anon12413 wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No it's not, they quoted some telemetry but the feature and decision may have been decided way before then. The data may only be a justification for it.

Re: Reducing notification permission prompt spam in Firefox

#72

Post by jeanmichelx »

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 like the Firefox approach. Nightly collects a lot of data (because you're a power user that want to improve the browser). Regular release collect a lot less.

Re: Reducing notification permission prompt spam in Firefox

#73

Post by _nedR »

feanaro wrote: post #57
lugg wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it's not. Currently on legitimate and decently built sites I get a custom JS modal popup that asks me to accept the location request before they even request location access. They do this because otherwise their location request gets dismissed by users out of habbit and then people don't know how to reenable it. It's shit UX. Notifications and always on location access should be a bell icon in the url bar. Think…

I think this bell meme is less widespread than you think. I can't imagine the people I know concluding that the notification permission is hidden under a bell icon, let alone find it intuitive.

Au contraire, i think the bell meme is more widespread than you think. Taking India as an example, the lower levels of literacy has actually made video content the primary form of online content. And with youtube being one of the major portals of such content and with every youtuber in every corner of the globe nagging subscibers (in their native language) to click that bell icon i think it has already spread to a large demographic.

Re: Reducing notification permission prompt spam in Firefox

#74

Post by dreamcompiler »

josephg wrote: post #45
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…

I opened a medium post the other day from my phone that did all this stuff. It was amazing - there was a bar up the top asking me to install the medium app. Then another bar below that asking me to subscribe to the author or something. Then a call-to-action pop-over on the bottom of the screen asking me to join a mailing list or something. Only about 1/4 of my phone screen was left displaying the content - which wasn…

Back in the 80s I used to read Texas Monthly magazine. It had a lot of good writing (still does). But I had to quit when they started putting the table of contents after 30 pages of ads. Worse, every issue contained 2 or 3 scratch-and-sniff perfume samples that made the magazine reek like a bordello.

We're kind of at that stage with the web now. There's no perfume (yet) but there are auto-play videos. (Thank you Mozilla for fixing these.)

Re: Reducing notification permission prompt spam in Firefox

#77

Post by fxfan »

jeanmichelx wrote: post #72
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 like the Firefox approach. Nightly collects a lot of data (because you're a power user that want to improve the browser). Regular release collect a lot less.

This is the reason why windows doesn't let you opt out- power users would opt out.

Case in point - jump lists were removed from start menu.

That said- why treat regular users unfairly by not optimizing for their use cases too?

Re: Reducing notification permission prompt spam in Firefox

#78

Post by owaty »

The article doesn't seem to mention this, but you can already disable popups for notifications in Firefox.

1. Go to Preferences, Privacy & Security

2. Scroll to Permissions > Notifications, click Settings...

3. At the bottom of the dialog window, check Block new requests asking to allow notifications

The permissions already granted will still work.

Re: Reducing notification permission prompt spam in Firefox

#79

Post by jfoster »

I feel that browsers are really getting permissions horribly wrong. The prompts often look very similar to each other (no icons) regardless of what they are for. Some permissions are detectable, others are not. When a site tried to use a function that's blocked, the notification in the browser is often easy to miss, leaving users wondering why the functionality isn't working.

If it were good:

1. Users would be very aware of the request or attempted use for any permission.

2. Users would be able to easily ignore that request without the permission prompt interrupting them.

It seems that browser vendors are struggling with a fairly simple UX problem.

Re: Reducing notification permission prompt spam in Firefox

#80

Post by endgame »

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…

I love the satirical version of this bullshit that http://n-gate.com/ uses.
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