[coldtea]

>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.

[Touche]

As already mentioned, there's already a setting for turning off notifications globally: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11433799

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.

[coldtea]

>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.

[oh_sigh]

> If people care enough for notifications, they will find a way to enable them. If they don't, no harm done.

If people don't care enough about notifications, they will find a way to disable them. If they don't, no harm done.

I appreciate that you have your own preference on this matter, but do you really think that most people don't like notifications? Most people want them.

[coldtea]

>I appreciate that you have your own preference on this matter, but do you really think that most people don't like notifications? Most people want them.

A source for that?

What's a fact is that all people didn't had them for the first 15+ years of the web, and I've never heard people complaining about that lack -- whereas people always asked for faster loading websites, less popups, no auto-play for sound and videos, ability to turn off ads, etc.

[esailija]

Notifications are necessary for many applications, they are not for traditional websites although sadly that doesn't stop them from requesting permission. Imo the notification feature really should require at least https, like many other intended-for-applications browser features like service worker and location. On mobile you could replace most native apps (twitter, facebook, mail etc) with a web app if they supported notifications and save gigabytes of space for stuff that actually needs to be native.

[oh_sigh]

People didn't have a lot of stuff for X+ years of the web. I'm not really sure how that is an argument for or against something.

None of the desires you list are associated with notifications.

[lawnchair_larry]

Most people don't. Most people are annoyed by their browser bugging them to make decisions for things they don't care about or need. Notifications from browsers or web pages is clearly a poor fit, UX wise.

[andybak]

Lack of notifications rules out an entire class of potential applications.

We can bicker about implementation but saying "web apps don't need notifications" is as nonsensical as saying "desktop apps don't need notifications".

[tdicola]

> Most people want them.

Source?

[Zarel]

In this thread, most people calling for deny to be the default state for notifications are being downvoted, while people defending the default of "ask" are being upvoted. Do you consider this sufficient evidence?

[tdicola]

Absolutely not. This is an echo chamber of people interested in technology and startups. To extrapolate out to the broader entire web user audience is a massive logical fallacy. I would hope that's obvious to almost anyone.

[andrewpe]

The problem is discovery. How are normal users suppose to understand the web as notifications now?

[tdicola]

When you visit an SSL encrypted website a little lock icon appears. It used to be when you visited a site with an RSS feed a little RSS icon would light up. I see no reason why notifications shouldn't be exactly the same. Give some ambient/unobtrusive notification of the capability. Don't force me to stop what I'm doing and make some decision for something completely orthogonal to what I'm currently doing.

[Touche]

You can already ignore notification permission dialogs.