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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

#151

Post by naikrovek »

StavrosK wrote: post #135
LeonM wrote: post #133

Serious question though: has anyone here ever used the notifications for anything other than web based IM (slack, whatsapp)? I think the use case for legit notifications is very small, thus the UI should be an opt-in, rather than an intrusive pop-up. I never understood why browser makers gave it such a prominent UI, and of course in this attention seeking market it was bound to be abused. The new UI that Firefox is s…

I use OneSignal on my blog ( https://www.stavros.io/ ), which shows a small bell on the bottom right. If you click the bell, you get prompted to enable notifications for new articles. Quite a few people have done that, as it's pretty convenient if you want to be notified of new content.

Thank you for tying that to a user action, and not page load.

Re: Reducing notification permission prompt spam in Firefox

#152

Post by naikrovek »

Improvotter wrote: post #145
LeonM wrote: post #133

Serious question though: has anyone here ever used the notifications for anything other than web based IM (slack, whatsapp)? I think the use case for legit notifications is very small, thus the UI should be an opt-in, rather than an intrusive pop-up. I never understood why browser makers gave it such a prominent UI, and of course in this attention seeking market it was bound to be abused. The new UI that Firefox is s…

I wish GitHub had web push notifications. I'm happy that Reddit has them, but they barely work to be honest. Sometimes it seems to work, most of the times it just doesn't.

GitHub has an API which you can use to subscribe to them.

I know that's not what you're asking for, but it's something to build upon.

Re: Reducing notification permission prompt spam in Firefox

#153

Post by nindalf »

SmellyGeekBoy wrote: post #108
nindalf wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firefox’s source code is open. So is Visual Studio Code. Could you please tell us what is collected that could possibly be used maliciously? You can get started here - https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode-extension-telemetry and https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode

I don't disagree with you but this is a discussion about Firefox, what does Visual Studio Code have to do with anything?

It's a discussion about opt-in telemetry (that I started). I pointed out VS Code as another example of an app that gets a lot of hate on HN for using opt-out telemetry.

Re: Reducing notification permission prompt spam in Firefox

#154

Post by krelian »

Maybe I missed it but I don't see a discussion about how the majority of sites are actually showing a "pre-prompt" for notifications before triggering the actual prompt from the browser. This is similar to how apps ask you to rate them using some internal UI and only if you rating is the desired one (5 stars) send you to the app store so you can rate them there.

With the notifications a 3rd party script is used to display a Yes/No prompt for notifications and only when you click yes on that prompt it triggers the browser's yes/no prompt. This allows the site to show you the notification request on each session while if they used the browser's native prompt they could only show it once.

Re: Reducing notification permission prompt spam in Firefox

#155

Post by StavrosK »

naikrovek wrote: post #151
StavrosK wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use OneSignal on my blog ( https://www.stavros.io/ ), which shows a small bell on the bottom right. If you click the bell, you get prompted to enable notifications for new articles. Quite a few people have done that, as it's pretty convenient if you want to be notified of new content.

Thank you for tying that to a user action, and not page load.

OneSignal does have that option, which I find supremely annoying. They should just take that out and always require you to click on the bell before triggering the notification.

Hopefully, with this browser change, they will.

Re: Reducing notification permission prompt spam in Firefox

#156

Post by EamonnMR »

Is there a plugin or setting to auto reject these in firefox and/or chrome? Notifications are something I will never want from a website, and most of the time its as annoying as a popup. No, random news site for somewhere I don't live, I would not like your notifications.

Re: Reducing notification permission prompt spam in Firefox

#157

Post by tendencydriven »

djsumdog wrote: post #138
LeonM wrote: post #133

Serious question though: has anyone here ever used the notifications for anything other than web based IM (slack, whatsapp)? I think the use case for legit notifications is very small, thus the UI should be an opt-in, rather than an intrusive pop-up. I never understood why browser makers gave it such a prominent UI, and of course in this attention seeking market it was bound to be abused. The new UI that Firefox is s…

Looking at my permissions, it'd only Mastodon/Pleroma instances and chat. The other 80~90% of sites that request permissions are blocked. The most annoying are news/blog sites. Who the hell actually clicks Allow? Like 1%? 2%?

I'd imagine a lot more than 1-2%. Watching my Father use his phone the other day and he just says yes to every single thing that pops up without reading it first. I imagine a lot of the older generation are like that.

Re: Reducing notification permission prompt spam in Firefox

#158

Post by tinus_hn »

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…

If you like it, feel free to enable telemetry. But why force me to enable it as well?

Re: Reducing notification permission prompt spam in Firefox

#160

Post by CheckBlanket »

These notifications can in a way act as a sort of adware. I had family friends who complained of pop ups on their laptop advertising dodgy products. Turned out they'd accidentally dismissed one of these with an OK and was being spammed in the desktop environment via Chrome.
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