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Reducing notification permission prompt spam in Firefox

blog.nightly.mozilla.org

201–210 of 268 posts

Re: Reducing notification permission prompt spam in Firefox

#201
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 it for calendar notifications.

Re: Reducing notification permission prompt spam in Firefox

#202
> Most prompts are dismissed, while almost 19% of prompts caused users to leave the site immediately after being confronted with them.

Guilty. I've started taking requests for permission to send push notifications as a strong signal that I've accidentally clicked on clickbait.

Re: Reducing notification permission prompt spam in Firefox

#203
post #21

Downgrading the prompt to a non-popup icon in the address bar unless it follows a user action sounds like the perfect balance. This won’t entirely stop sites which are properly trying to request the permission in the worst case, and the navbar icon is unobtrusive enough that if it gets spammed it’s no big deal. Actually I think it makes sense to persistently show the notification icon in the navbar once the permissio…

I'm afraid this will backfire. We might see another wave of "click this icon in your browser to receive the latest notifications!" pop-ups showing up. Which would then require an adblocker to block these kind of popups.

So we use an ad-blocker to block a popup, which only appears because a browser vendor decided to hide a popup.

This is absurd.

Re: Reducing notification permission prompt spam in Firefox

#204
I don't want to receive notifications from any site nor grant any permissions to any website ever. Perhaps some people want to grant permissions and to receive notifications from some websites but it seems obvious that will always be about just a small selection of favourite websites. So I doubt it even is reasonable to pop anything up, just make subscribe/allow buttons easy to find yet waiting for the user passively.

Re: Reducing notification permission prompt spam in Firefox

#205
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%?

According to the article, overall acceptance rate on the notifications popup is 3%. But that will include legitimate notification requests like Gmail, Discord, Slack, etc..

That also includes people that just randomly accept any notification their computer gives them. This is older people who don't understand the specific permissions they are granting.

There was one time I was clicking on a navigation element right as a popup for notifications popped up and i accidently clicked it. I immediately went in and reverse the permission to block access, but I am sure there are use cases of accidental acceptance as well.

So considering all of that. My guess is that real intentional adoption is below 1%.

Re: Reducing notification permission prompt spam in Firefox

#206
post #90

It's insane that the two visible options are "Not now" and "Allow notifications" while 99 percent of the time I want never bother me again, in fact disable this feature entirely. I clicked yes exactly 3 times (my own Nextcloud instance, Protonmail and Whatsapp web), I'd be happy to do some more clicking to enable those at the "cost" of never being bugged again.

> It's insane that the two visible options are "Not now" and "Allow notifications" I agree the “Never” option could be more visible for some prompts, like notification. For other things, like location data, where temporal access actually makes sense, I think making the “Never”-option less susceptible to accidental/blind clicking is a good idea.

Then "Allow" should be less susceptible as well.

Re: Reducing notification permission prompt spam in Firefox

#207

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 di…

>>the majority of sites are actually showing a "pre-prompt" for notifications Do a majority of sites do this? I have never seen it, but have seen the browser notification prompt several times

I have seen this. For example, some online shops, newspapers.

Re: Reducing notification permission prompt spam in Firefox

#208
post #90

It's insane that the two visible options are "Not now" and "Allow notifications" while 99 percent of the time I want never bother me again, in fact disable this feature entirely. I clicked yes exactly 3 times (my own Nextcloud instance, Protonmail and Whatsapp web), I'd be happy to do some more clicking to enable those at the "cost" of never being bugged again.

This is a valid point. I just took an inventory of all the notifications I have opted into. For me it is Gmail, Discord, Slack, and a custom built admin interface I use for work. So I have accepted 4 out of the hundreds (or thousands) of notification prompts I see every year.

Making it opt-in would still allow valid use cases for notifications, while not annoying users as it has become for sites that are just hoping ou would break down and accept.

I also hate that the only "negative" option is "not now". Why is there not a "never allow" option?

Re: Reducing notification permission prompt spam in Firefox

#209

> Most prompts are dismissed, while almost 19% of prompts caused users to leave the site immediately after being confronted with them. Guilty. I've started taking requests for permission to send push notifications as a strong signal that I've accidentally clicked on clickbait.

It's hard to interpret a push notification as anything other than a sign that it's a shady site.

Re: Reducing notification permission prompt spam in Firefox

#210

> Most prompts are dismissed, while almost 19% of prompts caused users to leave the site immediately after being confronted with them. Guilty. I've started taking requests for permission to send push notifications as a strong signal that I've accidentally clicked on clickbait.

Most of the internet is clickbait these days.
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