> How about the site NOT bothering me in the first place? Not even for my consent?
So you'd rather no one have the ability to receive real time notifications from a web application just so you can't be bothered for a second from a permission request that you can actually ignore in its entirety?
I don't really understand your view point. Web applications can provide very rich functionality so why would you want to limit that to non-real-time?
Notification flag prompts interrupt my browsing flow.
A browser popping up a permission request to ask me whether I want to receive notification is very likely an annoying interruption, and is not relevant to my current task. It would be much better to indicate that the site is notifications-capable with an icon, heck the sites can have an opt-in button, just don't pop up that prompt and force me to acknowledge it.
>Web applications can provide very rich functionality so why would you want to limit that to non-real-time?
Because applications also provide very shallow functionality -- and especially most of the ones I see asking for notifications (makes sense too: marketers and spammers and the first to jump on such features).
Also because a user can always go to the settings of the application and explicitly enable it. That's why there are settings.
If they don't like settings pages, and think users would not find them, they could also have an "enable notifications" link/button somewhere prominent in the header/footer etc for the user to click, instead of directly asking users.
As for non-tech savvy people, notifications and popups just confuse most of them, and they blindly tend to click to dismiss them, either yes or no, often without even reading the message carefully (or at all). That's something that has been hammered on by UX experts since the dawn of time.
Having a web feature off by default is essentially damning it to not exist, so that's a non-starter. If you don't like the features that are enabled by web standards most of them can be globally disabled by turning JavaScript off.
>As already mentioned, there's already a setting for turning off notifications globally
That's good, but might be too blunt a hammer. What should be is a standard way to turn them on/off per individual site, WITHOUT unsolicited popups.
>Having a web feature off by default is essentially damning it to not exist, so that's a non-starter.
As an IT teacher in a past life I've seen 10 year old kids go through 10 layers of obscure program settings to enable a particular behavior / proxy their way out of a school network / etc.
If people care enough for notifications, they will find a way to enable them. If they don't, no harm done.
Because I'm old enough to have seen stupid trends like this come and go. I like to browse the web on my terms and not be bombarded by useless information. I know it's a crazy concept for some young people these days but sometimes people don't want any interruptions or distractions like real time notifications. If anything notifications should be entirely opt in where you explicitly go to a page on a website and turn it on--not spamming every time you visit to ask if you want to turn them on.
Then just fucking disable them jesus nobody gives a shit. All you're doing is complaining. In case your time is too precious to lookup how (because complaining about meaningless shit on the internet is obviously more important) I've written you a nice guide:
- Open Chrome.
- In the upper-right corner of the browser window, click the Chrome menu Chrome menu.
- Click Settings > Show advanced settings.
- In the "Privacy" section, click Content settings.
- In the dialogue that appears, go to "Notifications" and choose the following:
- Do not allow any site to show notifications: You won’t see any notifications from websites.
Why does it have to assume when I vist a site I want the distraction at all? How about we put it in a setting or other page I have to explicitly visit and opt in to receive notifications. Just like signing up for emails, etc...
Seems like someone put a lot of effort into thinking through the use case.
Browser based chat apps like Slack, webmail, among other things are the sort of stuff I like some notifications on. Yeah there's a "app" for Slack, but it's a web view. Easier for me to have it as a pinned tab and always know where it is since it's either Chrome or terminal where I spend most of my time.
That's a valid point for such apps as Slack or Gmail etc.
But then:
a) the majority of the apps asking for notifications are spammy sites (as always the louder offenders).
b) Slack, Gmail etc can have its notifications enable toggle hidden in Settings (and Slack indeed has significant customization options for notifications there).
If we start saying "ok, Slack is useful, so it's OK to allow it to show an unsolicited popup asking to show notifications" then next thing we have half the useless web also doing the same.
It's not a slippery slope either -- it's just how the web and spam works, with spammer sites/ads/etc exploiting any given opportunity to be loud and soliciting to the max...
If you're so easily annoyed you should really be surfing with JavaScript off. The reality is that sites can do any number of things to annoy you because you are giving them permission to execute code on your machine. If you don't trust them with this permission then don't give it to them.
What's "easy" about it? My annoyance is the age old popup annoyance, something tons of web users have lamented for ages.
Ever heard anyone say they LIKE unsolicited popups? Even if it is to ask permission for something?
>The reality is that sites can do any number of things to annoy you because you are giving them permission to execute code on your machine. If you don't trust them with this permission then don't give it to them.
Sounds like a slippery slope. I don't understand these kind of half-thought arguments.
I never said I want webpages to act as simple text. I like dynamic pages and apps -- I just don't like unsolicited popups and dialogs.
The same holds true for the desktop, and countless people have expressed their frustrations with such popups there too. Starting from Clippy, the most annoying popup of all time, to the backslash against Windows (Vista?) "asking for admin permissions" dialog, which made them tone it down, and all the way to today...
If people didn't want web notifications, they wouldn't have been explicitly added in to the specs.
This thread is getting ridiculous. I appreciate people don't like notifications but the very few sites that request them are sites like gmail, discord, irccloud etc which the majority of people absolutely do want notifications from.
> If people didn't want web notifications, they wouldn't have been explicitly added in to the specs.
Web standards aren't a democratic process that all the web users vote on. They're defined by a consortium of companies each with their own special interests and agendas. Pop-ups were allowed by web standards and we've gone out of our way to build tools to prevent them.
> If people didn't want web notifications, they wouldn't have been explicitly added in to the specs.
Which people? The developers or the end users? It's a cliché but I can't see my non-techie mom or dad, or cousins, aunts, uncles ever wanting website notifications on their laptop, not even for gmail.
So now everybody gets alerts to accept notifications so those 0.001% techies/devs who want them can use them? they could enable it themselves.
The _very few_ sites include also techcrunch and others. I see people thinking they got a virus because they're getting notifications on their OS by a website they've accepted by mistake.
And also because "always deny" or "turn off" is too blunt a tool.
And because the HN crowd is full of people that design and code such defaults in their apps (including lots of browser developers), and their webpages.
It's not a forum with people merely looking for the quickest solution to solve a personal problem with how their browser behaves.
But why think about those issues when you can instead post snide, edgy, holier-than-thou snark on the internet?
Chrome's implementation of "always deny" isn't particularly blunt as a tool; you can still turn it on for sites on an individual basis.
The default of "ask" is ideal for me and most users. Judging from the number of downvotes you've received in this thread, it seems like your preference isn't particularly common. It doesn't seem too much to ask you to change a setting in Options to accommodate your uncommon preference.
I don't, I like having long stretches of time without distractions. Then I can choose when I want to catch up on mails and when I want to get to work. Please let me keep browsing the web like this too.
You keep suggesting this in replies but I don't know if you're actually serious or not. Disabling Javascript will break the vast majority of websites today from even rendering. Asking users to break rendering of the web just to stop annoying notification permission requests is silly.
You say you don't like distractions but there are dozens of ways a webpage can distract you. They can throw an alert() at you and you are forced to deal with it. This is much worse than an ignorable permission prompt.
If browsers were to remove alerts, remove all types of features that need notification dialogs, web pages could still throw a modal dialog over its content.
What you are asking for: a web with JavaScript but somehow with "distractions" prevented, is impossible. The second you allow someone to execute code on your computer, you are allowing them to do things that you might dislike.
I'm not asking that notifications be completely removed from the spec. I'm pointing out that popping a distracting dialog when you visit the root of a domain is a poor design decision that should be re-evaluated. We don't do it for SSL, RSS, favorites, and plenty of other information about a site. I don't see why web notifications are so important they need to distract people immediately upon visiting the site.
>I don't understand what you want. You say you don't like distractions but there are dozens of ways a webpage can distract you. They can throw an alert() at you and you are forced to deal with it. This is much worse than an ignorable permission prompt.
Did you see us anywhere else rooting in favor of alert() windows?
If not, how are we contradictory, or how is that they are ALSO annoying relevant? We are both against those AND against notifications. How's that hard to understand?
Yes, there are lots of ways a browser can distract us. That's why want to remove some of them. A few, like the option of a modal window, we consider necessary evil -- but still, we'd advise against developers overusing it.
That doesn't mean we can't complaint about other distractions. Like autoplay on videos and music, bad contrast, intrusive apps, etc.
Also, taking something out or making something slightly more difficult to achieve still has merit for eliminating it, even if there are workarounds. It's not "all or nothing".
The "blink" tag got killed too (FF killed it first back in the day IIRC), despite the fact that it was part of the web standard or that it could be replicated easily with JS and CSS. And guess what? We don't see the same effect as much now -- even though it's 100% possible, and takes 1 line of CSS animations to achieve.
>What you are asking for: a web with JavaScript but somehow with "distractions" prevented, is impossible. The second you allow someone to execute code on your computer, you are allowing them to do things that you might dislike.
And a world without bullying is also impossible. As long as people are people, some are stronger etc. This doesn't mean we can't or shouldn't fight against it.
The world is not "all or nothing", either no distractions at all for some Gopher-era experience, or full blown access to all kinds of bells and whistles for distraction...
I like to use Facebook chat on the web and get the same benefits of FB Messenger (e.g. notifications) without having to use the mobile app. The app strips away far more privacy rights than I'd like where as I have a lot more control with browsers.