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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

#251

Post by muricula »

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…

lichess, a chess website, uses them so you can tab away while waiting for a game to start.

Re: Reducing notification permission prompt spam in Firefox

#252

Post by NoodleIncident »

rypskar wrote: post #161
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…

>>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

The giveaway is that the arrow doesn't actually leave the page and overlap the status/url bar. It's pretty subtle

Re: Reducing notification permission prompt spam in Firefox

#253

Post by giancarlostoro »

airstrike wrote: post #242
giancarlostoro wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm just bummed the old greasemonkey site is gone (or whatever it was called), it feels awkward trying to find scripts now.

I'm even more bummed the old stylish plugin was really malware https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/07/05/browsers_pull_styli...

Eventually, it wasn't always so but yes that's disappointing.

Re: Reducing notification permission prompt spam in Firefox

#254

Post by jdofaz »

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…

gitlab and some internal sites

Re: Reducing notification permission prompt spam in Firefox

#255

Post by EamonnMR »

CodeCube wrote: post #178
EamonnMR wrote: post #175

While we're at it, some sort of "always opt in or opt out of cookies" standard would be very nice. I'm really tired of sites asking for permission. Forcing companies to ask to use cookies was a mistake, cookies on/off should have been a browser feature first.

It was ... it just wasn't really exposed except as "arcane configuration that 99.9% of users would never even know was there". This is why we, as an industry need to be proactive in putting the user first in decisions like this, because if we don't, it will get abused, and then that's when the regulation comes (and rightly so).

Tracking is the reality, cookies are merely one form of it and disabling them does basically nothing. "Regulator mandated popup" is the worst possible outcome.

Re: Reducing notification permission prompt spam in Firefox

#256

Post by otikik »

andybak wrote: post #132
otikik wrote: post #131

I would be happier if Firefox dropped the prompts "feature" completely. Just ignore it. Less code, less dependencies, and less hassle for everyone involved.

And you can't think of any valid use-case for notifications for anyone? Bearing in mind that we are talking about a huge range of potential apps that now run in the browser? How about communication apps? Or reminder apps?

Make the 10 users who need those install a plugin.

Re: Reducing notification permission prompt spam in Firefox

#257

Post by grincho »

solarkraft wrote: post #221
IshKebab wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aren't there already sites that show a fake permission request dialog? This won't stop them (and I don't see how you could without entirely removing the feature).

This type of cancer is what we need in-page popup blockers for. Mozilla has been promising to work on it and started a data collection program that I contributed to, but there are no news to share and the data doesn't seem to be publicly accessible. What a disappointment.

Nudge and you shall receive!

https://github.com/mozilla/popup-urls

Thank you for contributing!

Re: Reducing notification permission prompt spam in Firefox

#258

Post by dblohm7 »

nindalf wrote: post #97
darkpuma wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He's also failing to acknowledge that using telemetry in a constructive way does not preclude using that telemetry in a malicious way as well.

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

> Firefox’s source code is open.

So is its telemetry data: https://telemetry.mozilla.org/

Re: Reducing notification permission prompt spam in Firefox

#259

Post by SquareWheel »

codedokode wrote: post #127
SquareWheel wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Turning off notifications for that website took at least 4 clicks through Chrome settings. It's actually just three clicks, and you can do so from the page itself. No need to go into settings. Click the Lock icon left of the omnibar. On pages that request notification permissions (eg. reddit), you'll see a toggle for it. Along with any other permissions requested.

But you have to make only one click to agree to the notifications.

Yes, or one click to disagree. What's wrong with that approach?

Re: Reducing notification permission prompt spam in Firefox

#260

Post by vsl »

nerdponx wrote: post #230
MrGilbert wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No, that's fine. Because the "click this button in your browser" popup is part of the normal webpage DOM and can be blocked using existing tools. As opposed to this notification, which was (ab)using the browser itself to spam the user.

It’s not fine. Safari lets me disable the requests globally, which I did, because every stupid website asks for notifications permissions.

Since then, there’s a lot of in-page popups asking the same, exactly as described above. No adblocker seems to be effective against them, and writing custom rules for sites I visit once isn’t sensible use of time...

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