I understand the advice, but I don't agree they're entirely without purpose.
> I have never seen them used for any legitimate or useful purpose
That's definitely overblown. I've got a half-dozen enabled, and on re-reviewing that list, I still think they're legitimate. Upon checking mine, I've whitelisted Google Calendar, Gmail, Google Meet, Mattermost (work chat app), and Slack, and I want notifications enabled for all those things.
> I understand the advice, but I don't agree they're entirely without purpose.
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> I've got a half-dozen enabled[…]
That's fine for you, a purveyor of tech news. For almost everyone else, they are a means to spam and false malware notifications.
Our company provides services to clients who rely on computers but aren't necessarily computer experts. The only instances of browser notifications that I've seen (on client machines) are those I just described. In fact, yours is the first instance of someone appreciating them that I've encountered.
No shade intended. I just don't think their benefit outweighs their abuse.
> I just don't think their benefit outweighs their abuse.
TFA said they're without purpose, I said I disagree. You're now saying their abuse outweighs their benefit, which is a separate topic, and is more subjective. I'm not sure I entirely agree, but I could definitely see a case for that.
You're certainly opinionated about something that it doesn't appear that you know very much about.
In-app notifications, SMS and web push notifications are all important means of communicating events that clinicians need to be aware of.
This is delivered via a PWA so that it works on the wide variety of devices we see across patients and clinicians.
Many elderly patients are confused by native apps and app store experiences. Many of them refuse to use an "app". Additionally, things like accessibility are problems that have been solved effectively on the web but can be more challenging with native apps.
Many clinical devices don't support app stores or installation of native applications.
When you've tried to implement reliable health care systems for elderly populations, clinical settings, mobile in-field settings and physicians in a HIPAA regulated space perhaps you'll be able to tell me a better way.
Your assumption that we use any technology because "we want to" indicates that you don't have much experience with this stuff, perhaps it would be better for you to reserve judgement in the future until you understand a subject a bit more thoroughly.
> That's definitely overblown. I've got a half-dozen enabled, and on re-reviewing that list, I still think they're legitimate. Upon checking mine, I've whitelisted Google Calendar, Gmail, Google Meet, Mattermost (work chat app), and Slack, and I want notifications enabled for all those things.
Most of it are native apps tho ?
The difference is that you install app explicitly for purpuse of doing that, vs "I accidentally clicked on website and now it sends crap to my feed" of average illiterate users.
They're mostly Electron, not native apps. My browser has extensions that help me with all of the tracking these apps are full of that are a hassle to patch in Electron apps (who know how Manifest v3 will affect Electron). Unless you have a FOSS TUI I can opt out of tracking, no thanks: I'll keep you in the browser in a pinned tab.
As a bonus, I can apply userStyles to fix their UIs such as them not making black #000 (muddy grey looks bad on OLED) or not using my user-agent-defined monospace font or putting too much padding around elements in a chat UI.
And that's fine, the article only disables pop-ups that prompt to enable notifications. For those few websites which really matter, you can explicitly click on "shield" icon and enable it.
The key idea is that enabling notification should be an explicit actions, and have more consent than a single click.
I don't have notifications / alerts for anything besides family trying to contact me. For everything else, I poll. This has the benefit of allowing me to focus on what I'm doing (which sometimes requires looking things up in a browser) without being interrupted while doing so.
Same: I understand the advice, but it's trivial to find cases where it's useful.
I have three enabled. One is for a past side-hustle, but the others are messages.android.com and messages.google.com . Definitely keeping both of those, even if/when I finally mostly depart the google ecosystem.
Right, a more reasonable argument would be just that the risks outweigh the benefits for some users, especially if they aren't currently using notifications on any legitimate sites.
Certainly for some people. I just prefer the tradeoff of carefully curating my taskbar at the expense of my tab list.
I (over)use the keyboard shortcut of windows key+# (so win+1 switches the focus to the first application icon on the taskbar, win+2 the second, etc), and I've got muscle memory of which applications are pinned to each place. Plus, I've already got the muscle memory of how to get to the various websites I keep open.
> I have never seen them used for any legitimate or useful purpose
That's definitely overblown. I've got a half-dozen enabled, and on re-reviewing that list, I still think they're legitimate. Upon checking mine, I've whitelisted Google Calendar, Gmail, Google Meet, Mattermost (work chat app), and Slack, and I want notifications enabled for all those things.