Reducing notification permission prompt spam in Firefox • Hacker News Board

Re: Reducing notification permission prompt spam in Firefox

#211

Post by lkbm » Tue, Apr 02, 2019, 1:54 PM UTC

giancarlostoro wrote: post #136

teekert wrote: 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.

I was beginning to wonder if I can disable globally by default and have no popups, just manually enable it for a specific site if I want it badly enough (I don't think I ever will anyway). Of course then they'll start showing weird UI pop ups to enable stuff, but if websites ever do that I will close them as I do with sites that tell me to disable adblock, the last few times I ever got malware on my system was due to…

Open Preferences and search "Notif". There's a blascklist/whitelist and a "no, and don't ever ask" checkbox.

I've always loved digging into the settings when I get a new web browser, IDE, or whatever. I know a lot of people don't bother configuring their software, but it just makes me shudder to imagine living with whatever defaults the vendor sets.

Re: Reducing notification permission prompt spam in Firefox

#212

Post by basseq » Tue, Apr 02, 2019, 1:55 PM UTC

bunderbunder wrote: post #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.

What's the logic for publishers, here? "If we add this feature, we will immediately bounce 19% of our traffic." Why would you do that? Or is this a scam thing where that 19% just proved they aren't suckers, so you don't want to waste your time on them?

Re: Reducing notification permission prompt spam in Firefox

#213

Post by jacurtis » Tue, Apr 02, 2019, 1:59 PM UTC

krelian wrote: post #154

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…

This is similar to how many iOS apps have gone to now. When iPhones first allowed permission prompting, every app used to just spam every permissions prompt as soon as you downloaded the app, hoping you accepted a few of them.

Now I have noticed apps are showing in-app prompts that say "We need your location in order to quickly find rides near you. Do you want to allow location access now?". This then prompts the actual iOS permission prompt to show up if you accept.

Re: Reducing notification permission prompt spam in Firefox

#214

Post by 13of40 » Tue, Apr 02, 2019, 1:59 PM UTC

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 clicked "accept" on about half a dozen of these from news sites sometime back just to see what would happen and I never got any alerts. I suspect sites enable it just because their news platform has a checkbox for it, then never send anything out because the acceptance rate is so low (or it would take more effort than checking a box).

Re: Reducing notification permission prompt spam in Firefox

#215

Post by codedokode » Tue, Apr 02, 2019, 2:00 PM UTC

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 would not like to use notifications for anything, including IM. Sometimes I get a lot of messages and I don't want them to distract me all the day.

A better idea is just to highlight the program in the task bar, as Windows XP did. In this case you can view the messages when it is convenient for you.

Re: Reducing notification permission prompt spam in Firefox

#216

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Apr 02, 2019, 2:02 PM UTC

basseq wrote: post #212

bunderbunder wrote: post #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.

What's the logic for publishers, here? "If we add this feature, we will immediately bounce 19% of our traffic." Why would you do that? Or is this a scam thing where that 19% just proved they aren't suckers, so you don't want to waste your time on them?

[deleted]

Re: Reducing notification permission prompt spam in Firefox

#217

Post by bunderbunder » Tue, Apr 02, 2019, 2:02 PM UTC

basseq wrote: post #212

bunderbunder wrote: post #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.

What's the logic for publishers, here? "If we add this feature, we will immediately bounce 19% of our traffic." Why would you do that? Or is this a scam thing where that 19% just proved they aren't suckers, so you don't want to waste your time on them?

Probably, the ad revenue from a person who will accept push notifications and then keep coming back to the site, following links and wasting hours and hours, is worth that of many, many, many cranky people like me.

Re: Reducing notification permission prompt spam in Firefox

#218

Post by jacurtis » Tue, Apr 02, 2019, 2:03 PM UTC

M2Ys4U wrote: post #137

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…

>This “feature” is abused terribly around the web. For every site with useful notifications like gmail, there are 10 which misuse it. I think you're off by an order of magnitude there. It's at least 100 sites that misuse it for every legitimate one.

Yes I think that 1/100 is a more accurate ratio. I have only accepted 4 notification prompts and I know that i have encountered more than 400 that I denied.

Re: Reducing notification permission prompt spam in Firefox

#219

Post by beat » Tue, Apr 02, 2019, 2:03 PM UTC

MrGilbert wrote: post #203

zaroth wrote: 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.

I'm not so sure. Right now, everyone uses the popup because there isn't an alternative. If there's an alternative, popup use will go down some - but how much?

Re: Reducing notification permission prompt spam in Firefox

#220

Post by codedokode » Tue, Apr 02, 2019, 2:06 PM UTC

basseq wrote: post #212

bunderbunder wrote: post #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.

What's the logic for publishers, here? "If we add this feature, we will immediately bounce 19% of our traffic." Why would you do that? Or is this a scam thing where that 19% just proved they aren't suckers, so you don't want to waste your time on them?

You bounce 19% of your traffic but some other 30% might accidentally agree to the notifications and now you can bump your traffic every day by sending them. Those 19% are probably useless people with adblockers that never give their email or click any ads so you lose nothing anyway.

Also, you can send ads using notifications and earn money.