Push notifications in Pale Moon

[KNTRO]

Hi Moonchild,

First of all, have a Happy New Year!

Now that Firefox 44 is offering push notifications, I'd like to know your thoughts about a possibility to include —or not— this technology in Pale Moon's future releases.

I'm pretty sure there's a fine print 'bout usin' this… as usual.

Thanks.

[dark_moon]

I can't see usage for push. Under android okay, but why in a browser?
Maybe you can give some examples.

[Moonchild]

Fine print from the kb article you linked to (did you actually read it?):

A site can use Push to send you a message at any time, even when you are not actively visiting it. A site that sends you a message can learn your IP address if it chooses to do so; this could reveal your location.

So, in short: even if you don't have the site in question open, the site operators (through the permanent tether to a push service provider, to begin with, that can also monitor you as long as the browser is open) can get information from your browser and send you notifications.
I really don't think I would ever want such a thing.

EDIT: On top, I'm sure if we want to implement this in Pale Moon, I'd likely have to implement my own push server as well (and somehow offer this to websites to use -- the API for this is an Editor's draft). Using Mozilla infra for this is a no-go area since they would have control over this feature in our browser in that case (next to the aforementioned monitoring). More administration and more server costs to run something like that.
There is no documentation or code that I have seen that is available that provides this Mozilla push server implementation. Also, if it's present, it's likely another one of those horrible Python implementations...

[Moonchild]

I can't see usage for push. Under android okay, but why in a browser?
Maybe you can give some examples.

I think Mozilla wants this for Firefox Hello (Loop). You know, so someone can "call" your browser.

[dark_moon]

Then i would say that Pale Moon doesn't need this.

[CharmCityCrab]

I have no interest in push notifications from pages I've navigated away from in my desktop PC browser.

I can't see any scenario currently where such notifications would be useful to me, and I see plenty of scenarios where they would actively annoy me.

Having said that, I'm open to the idea that some unanticipated example could come along in the future where I might say "Ooohhh, *that's* something I'd want to have push notifications for", and changing my mind. But, right now, not something I want.

And having said that, I guess if Pale Moon added them, and there was an option to disable them that I could check once and forget, I'd deal with it.

I'd rather have the manpower hours that might be devoted to adding this to Pale Moon focused on other parts of the project, though.

My guess would be that this goes the way of Google Chrome's Google Now integration (i.e. is eventually dropped from Firefox due to nobody using it).

[LimboSlam]

If twitter and other websites can annoy me with their repeated notifications after I said no to them, then why in the hell would we trust Mozilla!??? So no thanks.

[CharmCityCrab]

It might also be worth mentioning that Mozilla Firefox for Android pushes popups directly over the bottom of it's browser "home page" (actually an internal page loaded from your phone's hard drive) periodically. They ask for donations, advertise their statement of principles, ask for feedback, etc. every so often. You can not turn them off.

I've send them a lot of feedback on TURNING OFF THEIR DAMN POP-UP ADS. Hasn't worked yet.

I don't see them going to push notifications ending well for their users, or their marketshare, for that matter.

I'm glad I have Pale Moon for desktop, which makes much more user-friendly decisions.

[KNTRO]

OK. Thank you everyone for sharing your thoughts about this subject.

[OmegaPhil]

Have just read into HTML5 notifications and push notifications (thanks for this topic) - so as of v26.5 push notifications presumably remain unimplemented (a good thing), but what about the about:config setting 'dom.webnotifications.enabled', which appears to be defaulted to True? Is this just vestigial?

[Moonchild]

Have just read into HTML5 notifications and push notifications (thanks for this topic) - so as of v26.5 push notifications presumably remain unimplemented (a good thing), but what about the about:config setting 'dom.webnotifications.enabled', which appears to be defaulted to True? Is this just vestigial?

DOM web notifications have nothing to do with Push. The only relevance is that Push will use the Notifications API to interact with the user and website.

Push notifications involve Notifications (what you asked about), Push (controlled by dom.push.*) which isn't available in Pale Moon, ServiceWorkers (we don't support those), the site that sets things up and the scripts used, a WebSocket connection to the push server, related permissions (Notifications and History), related prefs, even different behavior for HTTPS and HTTP. Killing the notifications API is a rather brute-force way of cutting of its head, but will also prevent visited sites from giving you notifications (which don't use Notification Push! but may e.g. alert you with a desktop notification if a long-running process is finished). E.g.: https://jsfiddle.net/qm8wh6b2/ for a basic notifications example.

[OmegaPhil]

Cheers - sounds like from a user perspective 'dom.webnotifications.enabled' is pretty much the same as 'notification.feature.enabled', which is disabled here.