…OK, that’s too dismissive. I do know that certain web apps and sites have legitimate uses for push notifications.
But I encounter these far, far more often on news sites, where I profoundly do not want notifications, ever.
Probably too convoluted of a “power user” setting for Apple to consider, but I would rather have a very strict opt-in whitelist where I proactively enter sites where I actually do want notifications.
I think this is a big step towards more PWA support. Would love a world where the alternative to building native was just building a PWA instead of building to some other framework that only exists as an abstraction to interact with a few specific platforms.
That being said, I definitely hope it's off by default
Yep. We're now really close to the original iPhone launch promise of "Want a new app that isn't shipped with the phone by Apple? Just build it as a web app!"
(Although to be honest, apart from push notifications, which are still vapourware right now, we've been able to replace almost everything native apps do with web apps for a while now. I'll be super curious to see how stuff like Rust and WASM go using some of these newly announced features...)
Yup. Really hope PWAs don't go the way of web components. There's been some genuinely incredible work done on that set of APIs and I'd hate to see it looked over.
The web is in a really funny place right now. It's easier to synthesize audio to read your blogpost to the user in whatever dialect you want than it is to style a number input consistently across browsers
> where I proactively enter sites where I actually do want notifications.
Isn't this how it works in Firefox/Chrome right now? I routinely get prompts from websites asking for push notification permission, which I always deny. Can't imagine Safari not doing the same thing.
Safari goes beyond Firefox and Chrome here, making the sane choice to only let you show a notifications permission prompt in response to a click. That alone makes it considerably better than what we're subjected to today with permission prompts showing on page load.
Firefox and Chrome don't allow permission prompts without user input. That's why all news sites will show you a banner asking you to click it to enable notifications.
I believe Firefox doesn't show the prompt at the top at all anymore nowadays and just has a glowing notification bubble in the address bar, but it's been a while.
All the denied sites shitting up my notification-apps list with noise isn't welcome, either.
The whole thing's a mis-feature. If it must exist at all, sites shouldn't be able to prompt for it, but simply advertise the functionality and let browsers add a little button or something for the user to actively engage with if they want to see a permissions prompt. Like the way browsers used to handle sites that advertised RSS feeds.
> and let browsers add a little button or something for the user to actively engage with
Meh, you'll just get full screen modals begging you to push the button. So long as a feature which (ostensibly) drives engagement exists, every ad based website is going to do whatever they can to get you to use it.
There are some really good use cases for it, but I think the balance is tipped by the far too many bad (for the user) use cases.
Having seen it in the wild I agree that it's more trouble than it's worth, and we'd be better off if the whole feature was ditched until/unless it can get a serious re-think. I'd be very surprised if the ratio of unwanted-to-wanted web-push messages is better than 10:1. I'd not be at all surprised if it's closer to 100:1.
For a while I would get web pushes from some new site I just have visited once and accidentally accepted. I had no clue how to disable them for ages until a friend showed me. (Yes I could have looked it up, never reached critical energy)
I have to imagine many people are in the same boat.
> Users opt into notifications by first indicating interest through a user gesture — such as clicking a button. Then, they’ll be prompted to give permission for your site or app to send notifications. Users will be able to view and manage notifications in Notifications Center, and customize styles and turn notifications off per website in Notifications Settings.
Looks like there will be some interaction required to prompt it.
That being said, hoping there's a browser-level option to just turn it off.
Is that user flow described actually a requirement somehow, or is that just an "ideal scenario"? Cause right after that it says "If you’ve already implemented Web Push for your web app or website using industry best practices, it will automatically work in Safari" and existing implementations don't require a button press that they used in their example. Facebook just pops up the browser prompts to allow or block as soon as you visit the page, as do many news sites and other stuff I don't want notifications from.
Maybe the "using industry best practices" part is key, and they somehow will block implementations like Facebook.
This is already the case for the install prompt used by PWA. The browser uses an interaction heuristic to send an event that allows a PWA to show an install button.
…OK, that’s too dismissive. I do know that certain web apps and sites have legitimate uses for push notifications.
But I encounter these far, far more often on news sites, where I profoundly do not want notifications, ever.
Probably too convoluted of a “power user” setting for Apple to consider, but I would rather have a very strict opt-in whitelist where I proactively enter sites where I actually do want notifications.