At work we have to use these Citrix environments on thin clients with sessions that get nuked after a few hours of disuse. Nothing trains you to muscle-memory to Edge quite like avoiding the whole Chrome onboarding experience every few hours. Edge is annoying too but much easier to ignore. You click the shit and get a URL bar not this whole amnesiac Googleverse login spiel. Edge annoys you to login, too but the annoyance at least GTFOs of the way.

>The second most are the "sign in with Google" pop-ups on many many websites. My answer is, "NEVER".

That's not even a chrome thing. I see it in firefox as well.

Use a chromium fork with manifest V2 support. They exist.

I think it has its uses. For apps. I've been meaning to add notifications to my app but I haven't gotten around to it. It's a b2b so it'd be strictly for their benefit, I don't get anything out of it.

It's just a very, very small # of apps have useful enough notifications that I'd want to enable them. I wish there was some other way to present "This app supports notifications" and allow users to opt in that wasn't quite so intrusive. Or maybe require that the user spends at least 10 minutes on the site/app before its allowed to show the popup or something. I don't know. The little RSS icons we used to have are maybe not quite noticeable enough.

To me the easiest fix is to just default notifications to off for all sites, remove the prompt, and if the user wants to turn on notifications for a particular site they can do so manually. Keeps the functionality while making it impractical for sites to harass users into approving and defeats those stupid in-site “we need to maintain the ability to prompt the user” pre-prompts all in one swoop.

Firefox onboarding is fine, fwiw.

For web apps I can imagine good uses for notifications, like how I have a Google Calendar tab pinned and it's useful for it to be able to alert me that I have a meeting in 15 minutes.

But for websites? Can't think of anything.

Here is proof that it is an intentionally-bad feature:

Web pages can tell if you enabled notifications.

The last time I checked, Slack used this to break unrelated functionality until you gave it browser notification permission, and re-broke itself if you disabled permissions after enabling them. Otherwise, there is no reason to enable it or install the app. (You can deny notifications per app, at least on apple platforms).

One of the most impactful things I've done with enterprise security, and I mean moreso than buying any expensive product, was deployed a browser policy that disabled browser notifications (and deployed ublock). Service desk calls from people claiming to have been hacked because their browsers kept popping up scare ware ads dropped to nothing overnight, with a notable drop in complaints and absolutely zero complaints logged about people who wanted notifications on something. It's obscene, the desktop notification feature has generated more work for security people than active directory and it's lack of mfa support.

They’re plenty useful when used by a service you engage with. I run Slack as a tab in my browser rather than as a standalone app and browser notifications make that usable.

I was thinking the exact same thing. Nobody want notifications. It's just a way for sites to spam ads.

The fact that you have to have a seperate warning for spam messages proves that the notifications system itself is a design flaw.