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Firefox's Web Push Notification System Announced
eldavojohn writes "Describing Notifications as 'somewhere between email and IM,' Mozilla has announced this push technology as a way to receive notifications from websites without having to keep them open in your browser — as well as receiving them on your mobile device. A JavaScript API reveals early interface ideas by the team. This core concept is not new — both Google and Apple have their own push notification systems for Android and iOS respectively. However, 'It's important to note that this push notification system is distinct from the existing desktop notification mechanisms that are already defined in pending standards. The desktop notifications that websites like GMail and Seesmic Web display to Chrome users, for example, will only work when the website is left open in a tab. Mozilla's push notification system moves beyond that limitation.' Mozilla is attempting to take push notifications to the entire web for any website to use."
That's pull, no push. Pushing is much more efficient.
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Requires your permission first. Get spammed? Revoke permission.
IE may have introduced it in IE8, but Netscape (Remember them?) introduced it in 1995 in NS1.1, and it's supported in every browser except IE: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Push_technology#HTTP_server_push
Riiiight. Because it couldn't at all be possible to have a settings page like this:
From which sites do you wish to permit push notifications?
slashdot.org
news.google.com
cnn.com
No, your browser would have to accept (and display!) every single notification ever sent to you. Makes perfect sense.
And for each little notification bubble, why couldn't there be a little button? "Don't allow any more notifications from this service." Done.
It's like saying you just have to deal with spam emails. No, you don't. That's what spam filters, whitelists, etc. are for. This sort of service sounds like it would be whitelist-based to begin with, so anyone who abuses the service can easily be blocked.
Check out my world simulator thingy.
You seem to have an off by one error in your IE versions.
A pull notification system is more efficient only if there are updates more frequently than polls. If the updates are very infrequent it gets to be more efficient for pushing. And pushing shouldn't require you to keep a connection open to each site, it should just require you to keep one port open where all push notifications would go. The server would open a connection to that port in order to send the push. Unless pushes are frequent then you might maintain an open connection blah blah blah. At least every push system that I've ever worked with works in this way. Usually results in less traffic since there's never a poll that goes "hey ya got anything yet?"
Kind of... if you had twitter notify you every time you got a tweet instead of checking your twitter feed.
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.