I have a self-hosted home automation platform with a web UI that uses web notifications for tons of things around the house (for example, a notification shows up on my device if the front-door camera notices my face, and the notification has 2 actions I can take right from the notification: "Turn on the outside lights" and "unlock the front door").

I also have it enabled for a website that sends out notifications when they go live for their podcast, the google play music site has them enabled for me to show song titles and album art when the song changes, and Circle-CI has them turned on for when builds pass/fail, but for some reason that one only works when I have the tab open...

That being said, i'm more than happy with this new UI! It's easy enough to find that sites can implement directions for users to go enable it if they want, and it's not in everyone's face for every news site that spams asking for it.

I use OneSignal on my blog (https://www.stavros.io/), which shows a small bell on the bottom right. If you click the bell, you get prompted to enable notifications for new articles. Quite a few people have done that, as it's pretty convenient if you want to be notified of new content.

Thank you for tying that to a user action, and not page load.

OneSignal does have that option, which I find supremely annoying. They should just take that out and always require you to click on the bell before triggering the notification.

Hopefully, with this browser change, they will.

I was part of a team that used web notifications as an experiment in sending live election results to people's devices:

https://medium.com/the-guardian-mobile-innovation-lab/genera...

It's a pretty fascinating feature set. You can attach images, update the content of an existing notification, attach buttons to perform custom actions, choose to make it silent or not... I think there is more utility than most implementations in the wild would suggest. One fascinating aspect of it for me is that you can do very time limited things (e.g. send election results) - users might be reluctant to download an entire app just for one evening of updates, but being able to send notification through the browser sidesteps that entirely (and more broadly, it puts a useful tool in the hands of people who can't afford native development).

That said, I agree that it's total madness that the default UI allows you to ask for permission on page load. We always had the prompt behind a button on the page and it worked great, so I think Mozilla have the right idea here.

I agree with you sooooooo much! Those popups are extremely annoying and mostly used on useless SEO blog traps. The whole notification UI should be much less prominent. If you really want to enable those notification, they should let you opt-in

Nope, IM is my only use case too.

It's actually really irritating the number of random websites that immediately popup an obtrusive notification prompt - I can only guess that they are hoping people accidentally click on the wrong button, and don't know how to disable it...

I've used it for letting customers know that artwork is ready for approval on a custom printing site. We give them the option of notification between email, text, and browser notification and our artists average creating a proof for approval in under an hour. Last time I checked, we have about 5% of people opt for browser notification only which is higher than I expected.

I wish GitHub had web push notifications. I'm happy that Reddit has them, but they barely work to be honest. Sometimes it seems to work, most of the times it just doesn't.

GitHub has an API which you can use to subscribe to them.

I know that's not what you're asking for, but it's something to build upon.

I know and I've been thinking about making it. Though I feel like it's not worth it. I would rather spend my time working on something that other people can use as well. I don't think many people are interested in a small app that only does GitHub notifications.

Yes, calendar apps like google calendar. Push applications like Pushbullet for Android. But I think your point remains... there are only a few good reasons for notifications.

> Serious question though: has anyone here ever used the notifications for anything other than web based IM (slack, whatsapp)?

I'm building a tool that uses browser notifications to ping when something new is created. It only asks for permission, when a user clicks the button which is clearly labeled to "setup browser notifications". It also sends only 1! notification until the browser tab is opened again, to not spam.

Judging from the responses, I think the reason is that browser vendors want browsers to stay relevant in a world of Apps.

At least one forum uses them to notice followup posts https://devzone.nordicsemi.com . It's redundant in that the forum can be told to notice by email.

Looking at my permissions, it'd only Mastodon/Pleroma instances and chat. The other 80~90% of sites that request permissions are blocked.

The most annoying are news/blog sites. Who the hell actually clicks Allow? Like 1%? 2%?

According to the article, overall acceptance rate on the notifications popup is 3%. But that will include legitimate notification requests like Gmail, Discord, Slack, etc..

That also includes people that just randomly accept any notification their computer gives them. This is older people who don't understand the specific permissions they are granting.

There was one time I was clicking on a navigation element right as a popup for notifications popped up and i accidently clicked it. I immediately went in and reverse the permission to block access, but I am sure there are use cases of accidental acceptance as well.

So considering all of that. My guess is that real intentional adoption is below 1%.

This is an occasional problem I've had on multiple platforms (Android/Windows OS, browser UI, ZoneAlarm way back when, etc). Why is it not yet a thing to ignore the first click within 50-100ms or so of a dialog popping up? Especially on desktop where you can find out if the cursor was already in place before the pop-up showed.

I'd imagine a lot more than 1-2%. Watching my Father use his phone the other day and he just says yes to every single thing that pops up without reading it first. I imagine a lot of the older generation are like that.

Gmail and G-Suite (professoinal Gmail) allow useful notifications. But those notifications only popup while a Gmail tab is open (such as in the background or not visible). So I like to open gmail while I am waiting for an email, I will get the notifications, can read the email, then close that tab and notifications are no longer arriving. One of the very few use cases for notifications that I appreciate. I have the same setup for Slack & Discord online versions.

Used them for paging/escalation systems (VictorOps, Pagerduty). Agree with all you wrote though, these are very niche use cases.

I clicked "accept" on about half a dozen of these from news sites sometime back just to see what would happen and I never got any alerts. I suspect sites enable it just because their news platform has a checkbox for it, then never send anything out because the acceptance rate is so low (or it would take more effort than checking a box).

The issue is that people will overlook it on IM sites now and then complain that there is no way to get notifications without an app.

So, the browser vendors worked around this by making it prominent. I think the interface was actually pretty reasonable for these legitimate use cases.

Unfortunately, reasonable tools that capture traffic will always be abused.

I would not like to use notifications for anything, including IM. Sometimes I get a lot of messages and I don't want them to distract me all the day.

A better idea is just to highlight the program in the task bar, as Windows XP did. In this case you can view the messages when it is convenient for you.

We use them at https://hund.io for notifying of a change on a status page (we're a status page provider). Users have to subscribe to push in order to be prompted by the browser for permission.

Our deployment tool at work sends you a notification if the deployment failed

I've seen some sites that do long tasks use them to alert you when the task is finished, so you can do something else while waiting and not miss when it finishes.

I use them for following YouTube channels that I like. I suspect many people would do this.

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

I use it for calendar notifications.

gitlab and some internal sites