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> Push messages can be particularly useful for applications that need to deliver timely, relevant information to their users, such as news or sports apps, or for e-commerce websites that want to send users notifications about special offers or sales.

Sure, they have their uses… but web sites will send far more notifications than anyone wants to receive. People would enjoy a drinking fountain but get a fire hose.

I don’t even think about it. I just click “no” (and curse under my breath for even making me do that) and move on.

I’ve never understood why the push notification permission doesn’t require a click to activate. Many other intrusive things (e.g. playing a video) do. Google have even gone down a long winded path of disabling the prompt for sites that have low acceptances rates which seems like a very over complicated solution.

Allowing it on page load has totally soured users on what could be a really useful tool. Sometimes I absolutely would like to receive notifications from a service without having to install an entire native app for it. Unfortunately that’s counter to the way Apple have implemented web push, requiring a Home Screen install before you’re able to use it.

Whenever I get prompted to allow them from a website, my immediate thought is "why would they ever think I'd want this?"
You can deny push notifications by default in your browser settings and never be prompted again. They can still be manually allowed on the sites where you actually want them. Same goes for location requests and other "site settings".
more like people want some eye drops of notifications, they get niagara falls.

everyone is competing for your attention.

Annoying fact is that every major browser silently installs itself into the startup process when you enable any browser push notification on Windows (with Edge being enabled for this by default iirc).

If you're wondering why your only 2-year old Laptop is slowing down when you boot it up - this is why. Chances are that Edge, Firefox and/or Chrome all three decided that they should have the right to run a full instance of themselves when you boot up your PC because you enabled a notification for a site that doesn't ever send any to begin with.

Browsers are heavy things to boot up (not to mention that in potato RAM environments, they eat through RAM like there's no tomorrow). To be clear, browsers being heavy applications is fine, it's one application where people tolerate it because of how versatile the browser is, but it is extremely frustrating when it results in the computer taking 5 minutes to sign in, when all they needed to do was quickly revise a Word document.

The result is that people end up writing off perfectly serviceable laptops for something that is easily disabled in the task manager.

This sorta thing really should get a big warning popup that if you enable it, it probably will end up slowing down your PC. I can't exactly celebrate the fact that all three major browser engines now pester users into slowing down their PCs.

Otherwise, if your relatives/friends are complaining their laptop is slow (and you're the designated IT person), enjoy the free advice.

In the same vein, I feel like persistent web workers need to be surfaced to the user more visibly than they are now, perhaps as a primary settings tab or something, and with periodic clean-up prompts from the browser (“foo.xyz has been running in the background for Y days without being used, would you like to stop it?”) because it seems to me that as things are currently at up, they’re gonna pile up indefinitely since there is no management to speak of. It also just seems kinda nutty that something that started running without my explicit permission can just hang around however long it wants to.
This is a Windows problem. I can cold boot and have Firefox up in 30 seconds in Linux.
> every major browser silently installs itself into the startup process when you enable any browser push notification on Windows

Don’t they already do that for automatic background updates anyway?

This is only a Windows problem. I never need to reboot my Mac unless there's a major OS update.
Nice, I do like it it had show quite useful for certain use cases.

Pro:

- notifications without needing a account (and e.g. giving them your mail)

- notifications when you use a web app (e.g. mail), I just don't want to install a app for quite a bunch of things, best it also works in situations where you simply can't install an app (e.g. company computer)

- less persistent/annoying then mail notifcation (through depends a bit on your OS notification manager)

Cons:

- less reliable

- less persistent then mail notification

- some sites try to push them on users, but then it's a pretty good indicator for which site not to use

Os/User Specific:

- I have seen cases where Windows displayed them quite intrusive and it was non obvious where they where coming from making it hard to disable them for a non tech versatile user.

Especially when it came to web mail clients, web messenger clients and some simple entertainment sites they have shown quite useful to me while the sites I visit normally don't try to push them onto users in an annoying way.

I have been waiting for this for a long time. I run a small forum and have maybe 10 core users who use it a lot. It is a recreation of a forgotten kind of old forum but with some modern features. I would like users to be able to opt-in to push notifications when someone replies to their post or when they get a private message. I get Patreon support that breaks even for server fees but otherwise it is a labor of love. I am currently using a Telegram bot to send users pushes but I was always hoping Safari would finally relent so I could use the real deal. Thank you, browser vendors. I agree with most of the comments here that push messages are generally evil but this is a huge boon for small niche websites like mine that don't have the resources to make a dedicated app.
The only way this should work is by requesting a user input that explicitly comes from the user. No auto-popup. Right now push are so abused that I always disable it on every parent/friend/cat browser.
It's a pity that the notification popups exist, they ruined notifications making them dead on arrival. It should be a browser setting UI somewhere so only motivated users can enable them. They can be useful. They should be an alternative to RSS. And they could remove a lot of bloat from app stores -- so many apps exist solely to capture the notifications channel
I wish browsers would have some kind of reputation system for push notifications.

If most other users find push messages from a site useful, then allow them. Otherwise, don't. Eg. Messages from ebay that say 'you won the auction, please pay now' might have the majority of users wanting.

Whereas messages from engadget letting you know that there are 112 new trending articles might see a far lower user interaction rate.

I would like the browser to have a setting "only allow push notifications from sites that the majority of other users interact with".

> These messages can be used to alert the user of new content or updates, remind them of upcoming events or deadlines, or provide other important information.

Or even information that's not important, I guess.

If a website has an update, well, sure they can "push" it; but why don't they just push it to their production server? It's obviously driven by the demands of advertisers, and any site that succeeds in pushing notifications my way is a site I won't be visiting again.

I can't recall a time, not even once, when I found pushnotifs in a browser useful or even desirable.

Even on my phone I block 99% of them because it's all just noise.

"Deliver timely and useful notifications to your users." - somehow I doubt the "useful" part. It's 99% just engagement noise to boost some PM bonus somewhere wasting precious time of users.
From the business side, all cases I remember why management decided to have some "native app" (even if its just a wrapped web app), is because they REALLY want notifications. (ignoring for a moment most users don't want them :-) )

So, does wthis mean we finally have the moment in time where PWAs start to be the best default choice instead of an appstore-app? I would appeciate that!

Too bad we're entering a time right now where the concept of "frontend engineering" evaporates in favor of Chat-UX :/

> This web feature is now available in all three browser engines!

I guess for practical purposes this is correct, but they should at least say "all major browser engines". There are others...

This is great news... Unfortunate as I used to be bullish on browser based push notifications, but in reality they were never working reliably on mobile devices.

I use a web API for my SMS gateway, and implemented push notifications via Firebase. It didn't matter whether I was using Fennec/Firefox, Chrome, or Vivaldi, I would always cease to be notified the moment the browser was killed off by my phone.

I eventually got sick of it and ported the logic over to call ntfy.sh instead. Not a single missed message since.

Am I the only one who has basically disabled all notifications at this point? Even if I turned them on for a select few apps I would actually potentially want them for (Slack, email, Instagram), there is so much noise in those apps and I can’t differentiate between what I actually want:

“send me Slack notifications if it seems urgent from my boss or team”

“send me email notifications if it’s from a top enterprise customer”

“send me Instagram DMs only if it’s from someone I’m interested in dating”

^ These are the kinds of notifications I would want to hit the push threshold but there’s no way to do that. Maybe a useful application of LLMs?

Deactivation of this feature, however, is done differently on every browser.
There's definitely a valid use case when building PWA apps. The problem in previous versions was the impossibility to change the notification service, it is now possible through the `PushManager`.
This is a major deal for progressive web apps (PWAs) replacing native mobile development. Most native mobile apps have been able to be replaced by a PWA for at least the last 5 years but couldn't, on iOS, if they needed notifications. Now we can say bye to all the native, cross-platform frameworks and just use PWAs.
Lot of strong feelings here about push notifications :) I think it's worth pointing out that (1) there are many people out there who find push notifications useful or even desirable, and (2) push notifications don't need to suck. Most push notification are annoying nudges because tools that allow companies to send notifications only allow mindless mass blasts with maybe a bit of only-slightly-less-mindless segmentation scattered in. There are better ways to do it. I'm helping build one of those ways (aampe.com), but my point is that we should distinguish between the current state of the technology and the potential of the technology to meet a valid need.
Great, right when this stopped being a commercial goal because we explained to the execs that we couldn't do it .

What a wonderful feature.

I'm gonna just quit and tell the boss to have GPT write the fuckin code for this. I'm sure that'll work.

Push notifications need to die.
I assume every service worker is constantly polling a server back-end, or, at least, has a long-running connection?

There are hundreds of service workers installed for me in Chrome (see: chrome://serviceworker-internals/)

I recall on iOS, Apple's infrastructure aggregates push notifications on the server-side, meaning an iPhone only has to maintain a connection to a single server for all push notifications.

Are there any similar initiatives for the Push API? Or is it simply not a priority, given the looser bandwidth/CPU constraints on desktop computers?

I never enable push notifications for any websites I visit, but I think, as a developer, it would be interesting to easily add push notifications for internal apps. i.e., stuff that one would use a Slack hook for, I'd rather have a homescreen web "app" that can send pushes natively (albeit via a third-party push broker) rather than having to either build your own native app or use a messaging platform.
I've been using push notifications for a while now. They can be very useful. I have a back end that send server events (PHP SSE) to my web app everytime a new there's a new entry on a DB, which triggers a push notification. That's how I did my sensor of presence [1]

1 - https://youtu.be/D4wimodtpKk

In my experience, web push notifications on Android do not show immediately (i.e. with high priority). They only show when your phone wakes. Does anyone know of a workaround for this?
This is a step in the right direction.

Now that they are standardized across all modern browsers, standards around their governance will follow.

How is that good? New ways to spam us?
We need modern Pop Ups!!
I have an app that makes very valid use of push notifications on the web. This should be celebrated because now you can do more without diving into the shitty apple app store with it's 100 dollar a year fee.
With more and more update recently, it's seems that Apple doesn't want to get another EU compliance rule of default browser?
you can turn off these requests for all sites in:

chrome://settings/content/notifications

Just make notification manager where I can see them all.

Like RSS READER.

Thanks for contributing to making the web a worse place, little by little, brick by brick. It's still barely usable but I trust that one day you and your peers will manage to make it unusable at all.
No, thank you
Apple supports them now. Everyone else has been doing it for years.
The first thing I do on any browser is to completely disable notifications, on PC and mobile both. There are zero legitimate use cases for this. If you need notifications, install an app.