It was nice when it was used sparingly by things like chat apps, but it's become too annoying; maybe the webmasters just don't understand they aren't the centre of their users' lives.

At least the latest version of Safari supports blocking all these requests.

Yeah I never accept that. Who would?

There are lots of reasons to accept that request.

Visiting the page for the first time and immediately getting a popup is not one of them.

It's a poor design where a site is allowed to throw up a dialog like that (also goes for the "this site wants to know your location! yes/no").

It should work like the popup blocker, just show a red cross somewhere, that some action was blocked, and if the user wants to, he can go and unblock it. The onus should be on the site owner to tell his user "if you want this additional functionality, please go and enable <this or that>".

Please, no. That would just end up with each site having their own annoying modal, instead of having a single place to block all of them.

I don't even know what it means for a website to send a notification. Does it mean a flashing tab in firefox?

Depends on your OS. For Chrome on macOS, it'll show a chrome-styled square box with an icon and a piece of text in the upper right hand corner, kinda like macOS notifications (but they look nothing like it). In general, web notifications (can) work the same way they do on your smart phone. They can arrive from an active tab as well as from a background service.

Safari (on macOS) will use the native macOS notification system to display notifications AFAIR. I have no idea what IE on Windows does.

> I have no idea wat IE on Windows does.

https://blogs.windows.com/msedgedev/2016/05/16/web-notificat...

But in either case the browser has to be running I’m assuming? Seems kinda flawed.

JS service workers allow a JavaScript thread to run in the background while the browser chrome (the window) is closed. So, in theory, the browser doesn't need to be open. Also, notifications can be useful with an open browser too (or, multiple tabs with a tab in the background for example)

That depends on the browser implementation. The protocol does not require the user to have the site open.

On ChromeOS & on Windows with the Edge browser it integrates with the OS notification system. Not sure what Firefox does.

That just caused me to block all notifications for all sites.

Use Chrome?

Then the settings are here: chrome://settings/content/notifications

I've noticed this trend as well, and it's accelerating fast. It's an unsolicited popup asking premission to send more popups. Thus I decided to completely turn off the notifications feature in my Chrome.

Same with apps on iOS. Smart apps ask the user before they request permission from the OS.