Slack has started disabling unrelated features if you disallow notifications. For instance, you can’t add channels to the “ignore @here” list if notifications are off. I’m sure this’ll get worse over time.

FF needs a “disable notifications, but lie to the website and say they’re enabled” button.

I've seen sites that refuse to show you their content at all until you've enabled notifications. I like this lying idea.

It should always lie. Consistently rejecting notifications is yet another bit for fingerprinting a user (not just a device).

I feel like a good extension to make would be a lying extension. Make it able to lie to a site about any API and have set configurations to deal with specific types of behavior.

Maybe even one that can randomise some settings to throw off fingerprinting.

I don't understand why browsers would ever not lie about this.

A non-malicious website could activate some alternative UI for giving you news if you disable notifications.

Maybe because of the privacy implications of web workers keeping connections/checking for new notifications in the background?

"Why are my notifications for Slack not working?"

"Because you've declined to get notifications for Slack"

This does not seem like a reasonable complaint to me.

But the application would have no way of knowing that to display this message to the user if the browser lies about it.

"Check if you have notifications enabled for Slack on your browser's settings"

It may require bandwidth and CPU to check for notifications.

I feel like if a specific browser, ie. Firefox went down this path, it wouldn't take long until websites stopped supporting that browser. It'd take browser wide action to take on big players such as Slack imo.

This is a common error people make. It’s transferring their emotions to inform what some (often companies or countries) should do.

In the specific example, it makes no sense for any single website to forgo, say, 5% of revenue to “teach browsers a lesson”, especially since any change would benefit them accrue mostly with their competitors.

See also: “Google/FB/... should leave the EU to protest these privacy laws...”

Unless a huge number of websites cooperate, they will all think it's useless for them individually to "fight the power".

No, no company is going to choose to see a -5% dip in overall engagement just because they want to fight a web browser.

How sad is the current age that this is the feature I'm most excited about in like the last 6 months of browser changes.

I never accept any notification from anywhere on desktop or mobile (except some calls) and am all the happier. Don't let others control your agenda.

In Firefox Notification prompts can be disabled entirely in settings.

In preferences type 'notifications', click the Settings button and check the box to "Block new requests asking to allow notifications"

I still remember Chrome and Firefox Engineers saying it would provide much better experience to user.

That was the era when majority of public opinion on Google was Do no Evil. And Google at the time can do no wrong.

I've built quite a few web apps that make decent use of notifications. But then the users explixitly wanted to know the things being notified.

It is pretty great for browser-based chat and email. Don't think I've ever allowed it for anything else.

It may not; you'll just get fake notification prompts from the page that will morph intro instructions on how to enable notifications when you click "accept".

This already happening for quite some time now. Many websites uses OneSignal and their fake prompt looks similar with Chrome's notification prompt (at least to ordinary users): https://documentation.onesignal.com/docs/permission-requests...

From this link:

"OneSignal Prompts are a 'soft request', meaning that they are not invoking the 'hard request' of the browser's Native Permission Prompt. This is important because if a user denies the native prompt, the developer is unable to prompt the user again, unless the user goes through a multi-step process to re-enable these permissions. On the other hand, if a user dismisses a Soft Prompt, the app or website can still present them the option later on."

Speaking for myself, showing such prompts repeatedly is a very good way to ensure that I'll never visit your website ever again. No, I don't care about your mobile app, anymore so than I did two days ago.

But it works on other people, which is why they bothered to create that in the first place.

Hi. I'm one of the founders of OneSignal.

To provide some context on this, we provide clients with 4 built-in prompting options and we do our best to encourage them to use the one that is best for their user experience.

We definitely want to discourage people from asking for notification permission in an obtrusive way. It's not good for anyone when that happens. We wrote a blog post with some recommendations here: https://onesignal.com/blog/web-push-permission-prompting-cha...

I'm not sure how to put this, but your product is "abused" to such an extent that I personally took the time to pop open the Web Inspector, find the CSS selector for the notification, and use it to look up your company and mentally blacklist it and make a point of bringing it up by name when relevant: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21848866. Your product is seemingly fundamentally misaligned with how users want to interact with the web, to the point where browsers are implementing behaviors that specifically target your implementation. Your blog post gives me very little confidence in your commitment to making this experience better:

> OneSignal encourages all websites to adopt a two-step prompting system if they don't already do so. This will help prevent the website from being penalized and forced to show a quieter permission prompt if too many users have denied the traditional native prompt in Chrome.

Websites are being penalized for a reason, and you know this. Simply adding another modal is just making the problem worse.

> The easiest prompt to transition to is OneSignal's Slide Prompt. Ideally, however, we encourage users to use the Custom Link prompt.

The Slide Prompt should not even be offered as a transition. It's completely at odds with the intent of this browser change, which is all about user intent. Providing facilities to present annoyances that bypass user interaction is the complete opposite of this.

> Offering a coupon in exchange for users opting-in to notifications.

…no?

Please, please, please reconsider how you are implementing these. If you are genuinely unaware of the widespread misuse of your tools, I'd be more than happy to direct you to numerous examples of zero-click, near-immediate, largely irrelevant faux notification requests coming from websites using your product.

almost simultaneous announcement from Chrome: https://blog.chromium.org/2020/01/introducing-quieter-permis...