Mozilla Will Run Two Experiments This Month With Firefox To Explore Ways To Fight Push Notification Permission Spam (zdnet.com)

Mozilla said this week that it intends to run two experiments over the course of this month to determine the most adequate way of dealing with push notification spam, a growing problem that is slowly deteriorating the web experience for everyone. From a report: The experiments will run in Firefox Nightly (v68) and Firefox Beta (v67). The Firefox Nightly experiment will run from April 1 to April 29. During this time, Mozilla said Firefox Nightly would only allow websites to show a push notification permission only after the user has clicked or pressed a key while on a website. All attempts to show a push notification permission request before a click or key press will be blocked by default. [...] In the last two weeks of the experiment, Firefox will show an icon in the URL bar, but with no visible popup on the page. Users can click this icon and accept any push notification permission requests if they wish so. Further reading: Mozilla and Scroll Partner To Test Alternative Funding Models for the Web.

Comments

Solution

[Rockoon]

Stop allowing websites to pop up anything, every. Seriously. For fuck sakes.

Why is this hard to understand?

Re:Solution

[nmb3000]

Stop allowing websites to pop up anything, every. Seriously. For fuck sakes.

Why is this hard to understand?

I have to assume it's because everyone working on the HTML5 stuff is too young to have learned anything from the first time around. In a lot of ways HTML5 is just version 2 of alert(), confirm(), and the embed tag. Throw in a little blink and marquee for good measure (and don't forget object and applet with WebAssembly).

It turns out that most of these were just abused a lot more than they were used for anything worthwhile. Is anyone surprised that HTML5's allow-by-default or ask-by-default notifications, video, location, camera, microphone, canvas, etc are being abused in the same ways, by the same actors? Only the 20-somethings writing the specs, I guess.

Re:You can turn them off

[Luthair]

Because its not a good experience if every single website you go to shows an asked for popup about showing you notifications, asking your location, etc. etc..

Re:We need to stop the HTML5 madness

[jfdavis668]

A comment about Chrome clones in response to one of the only browsers that doesn't use the chromium blink engine.

Problem solved ...

[fahrbot-bot]

Add these to your "user.js" file:

user_pref("dom.push.enabled", false);
user_pref("dom.webnotifications.enabled", false);

Optionally these too (may be redundant with above):

user_pref("dom.push.alwaysConnect", false);
user_pref("dom.push.connection.enabled", false);
user_pref("dom.webnotifications.serviceworker.enabled", false);