There is a bit of hubris when it comes to websites even asking to allow notifications. No site is that important. why would I ever want to enable notifications under any circumstance ever. I generally get badgered about it by a site I'll probably only visit once.
It makes sense for web applications that are real applications. The CI suite my company uses sends notifications for a passed/broken build, which is a reasonable use. Mail sites can send new messages.
The problem is that there's lots of content the publisher thinks is notification worthy, but not the user. No, I don't need a notification every time you post to RandomNewsSite.com.
This is basically why I don't read work email. If it's important, someone will come over to my desk asking if I got the email within 30 seconds. Hell I stopped listening to voicemail from a previous boss and just deleted it, For three years or so and it never caused a problem.
I just leave my email client and systems report open all the time. That way I can easily glance over and check if something needs my attention when I have some attention to spare, rather than be distracted by a notification appearing randomly over my work.
Google wants the web to stay on par with native apps, for obvious reasons.
That’s why they invest heavily in Chrome (and FF, to some degree), and work on all sorts of APIs like notifications, WebAudio, etc.
The decision process is probably not far off from “could a sandboxed, locally installed, native app do this?”
Turning notifications off by default would probably err to far on the other side. At the very least, they would want some noticeable UI indicator that notifications are available. I could also see it becoming a feature only available to sites after x visits/y days.
Yeah, it's useful for web.whatsapp.com, email, Slack. I appreciate that I can run these as browser tabs instead of having to explicitly install them as separate programs. The notification popup is useful for them.
It'd be interesting if browsers had a default setting that didn't allow a site to ask for notifications until you had switched to the tab and left it open a handful of times, or if they expired notifications automatically after you hadn't been to a site for a few days. It would also be interesting if they only allowed them for "pinned" tabs.
