[KevinGlass]

I honestly think desktop notifications in their current form are one of the worst features of the modern web. Sure it's nice to get an email alert but on my experience there's probably a thousand confused old people getting spammed for each person that intentionally enabled it.

What's worse is they look like native OS alerts (on Windows) so when one says "SECURYIRT ALERT!! CALL NOW" it's that much more effective at getting people on the phone with scammers.

[cortesoft]

So many sites ask for permission to send notifications that have zero reason to do so. Why would I want push notifications from a shopping or news site?

[tim--]

Honestly, push notifications from a news site arguably is one of the few sites that I see having a reason to send push notifications.

Communication platforms; messaging apps (Slack, Discord etc); email sites (gmail and co.) also make sense. Financial platforms (banks, Stripe etc)

Once you start getting out of these two categories, then yeah, it gets silly. No way should an airline website even be allowed to ask to send push notifications.

Google does have a way for Chrome users to not show the notification window (https://yespo.io/blog/google-chrome-will-now-block-abusive-b...) by default (https://support.google.com/webtools/answer/9799829?hl=en) but I really wish that this was flipped, so that Google would first need to approve sites to use notifications, similar to the Public Suffix List.

[jeroenhd]

Same reason you subscribe to their newsletters. To get discounts.

I don't understand why people would want that, but neither do I understand the people who actually enter their email address in those "subscribe to my newsletter" popovers.

[ryukoposting]

I wonder how many people's browsers get push notifications from Temu, or Amazon.

[zamadatix]

I feel like the web would be a better place if "allow notifications" popups were only allowed for PWAs the user already installed. I.e. they have to manually interact with the page and then click the prompt acknowledging they want to install the site as an application on their computer before the site can start popping up windows from the browser asking for notification permissions.

It's not that there are 0 use cases where it could possibly be convenient to get notifications from a plain site but, like you said with the email example, 95% of the legitimate use cases are probably better modeled as an app anyways.

[PaulHoule]

What's "progressive" about installing software?

It's always saddened me that people failed to understand the web platform, and never more so than today when that platform could be on the verge of extinction.

Young people don't remember this: in the 1990s if a big corporation wanted to make a 1-line change to an application deployed to a fleet of desktops they'd have to update every single machine and to do so they'd probably have to hire at least 1 FTE and probably more for installer engineering and other makework.

With the web it is often

   git pull

on the server and you're done!

As it is I can find web sites with search, links from other sites, bookmarks and history. If you "install" applications you just clutter up your desktop with 300 icons for applications you don't really use which makes it hard to find the 2-3 that you really use.

[codedokode]

Instead of desktop notifications web apps should use pinned tabs and show a badge in the tab header.

[layer8]

That’s more a browser implementation issue though. Browser could offer that as a choice for how to handle notifications, on a per-website basis.