There is a long history of large companies trying to cram push notifications down our throat, starting with Active Desktop and Active Channels in Internet Explorer 4.0. They didn't because no one is trying to develop user friendly experiences, not Google, not particularly Apple, least of all the people who have been building the browsers. RSS is actually a great solution for that and I think the mobile operating systems should have built it in from day one, with 'harass me via beeping and shaking and pushing' as an escalated level of permission that apps need to request specifically. I'd much rather have the latter class of 'notifications' batched up and pulled down once every hour or three, with no sound, vibration or visual interruption.

CNN publishing 'breaking news' that's probably wrong anyway because the event is 5 minutes old? Loan offer #257 from the PayPal app? No thanks. How many of these did you really need to see immediately? An impending food delivery or Uber arrival, sure (but we could also just use phone calls and SMS for these geoimmediate use cases). Think about all the notifications you receive (way too many, probably). Another is that you get your notifications in real-time. Push has several advantages - one is background power consumption (less work for the device to just sit around and wait, vs constantly firing up the network and polling a server). The main difference between web push notifications and RSS is that as the name implies, notifications are pushed to you on the publisher's schedule, whereas you pull down RSS on your own schedule. The community can take over these extensions and you have a starting point to personally adapt and fork them that is a lot simpler and faster than trying to maintain a browser fork.įurther the browser maker can more directly see usage of these feature replacing extensionsĪnd finally, when removing features ensure the extensions api has the power to support their replacement. Thereby mitigating the security risk and alleviating the discovery problems. Then when these features are removed they are instead moved to an official extension. Maybe the best way forward is to take an apple iPhone approach and have official extensions, similar to the apps that come with the iPhone like the podcast one. IIRC this isn’t even theoretical it’s happened with ones that replaced user style sheets, another “unused” feature that was gradually deprecated.

You also have a discovery problem having to wade through multiple options increasing your surface area to malware exposure. I’m personally not upset just worried about the fact that security is now a huge risk because you’re having to trust an extension creator that has access to your entire browser history or worse and who is one auto-update from turning to spy or malware.

Netnewswire on roku