1305410 - Clearing History should not affect notification allowance.

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(Firefox :: Site Identity, defect)

Description

[Mahadev Majaladar]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_11_5) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/53.0.2785.116 Safari/537.36

Steps to reproduce:

1. I visited https://tests.peter.sh/notification-generator/ and page asked me for Notification Permission and clicked on Always Receive Notification.
2. Then I clicked on "Display Notification" button and I got web push notification.
3. Then I cleared history including site preference,closed the browser,opened browser again, and visited https://tests.peter.sh/notification-generator/ and it asked for permission. (so annoying, I have already given permission)

I did the same thing in Google Chrome but at 3rd step, web page had not asked for permission. Because of Google chrome stores "Notification Preference" in a separate way apart from browser history related things.



Expected results:

Firefox should also store Notification Preference in Google chrome way so that Clearing History will not affect user experience. It is so annoying that after clearing history every time, a web page asks for notification permission

Comment 1

[Marco Bonardo [:mak]]

Panos, do you know where we track bugs about these notifications? It's surely not in bookmarks & history :)

Comment 2

[Panos Astithas (he/him) [:past] (please ni?)]

Moved to the right component, but I have to admit I'm baffled at the request here. Why is it that you went to such great lengths to remove every trace of a site on your computer, but you'd rather persist the permissions settings? What is the motivation behind this use case?

Comment 3

[Mahadev Majaladar]

Suppose, I have implemented Firefox push notification on my website. My website visitor will see permission at top-left corner and he/she will click on "Always receive notifications" and then I'll save subscriber id in my database to send a notification to this subscriber. Right?

Later time, subscriber deletes history and of course notification permission setting. He/She will again see notification permission after visiting my website and would think like "I already was given permission to receive the notifications, but it is asking me again" Looks Spammy. Right?

Moreover, when the subscriber id which I have saved in my database would become useless.

Google Chrome/Safari understood this problem and created separate notification center.

What do you think, is it necessary to implement separate notification center in Firefox too?

Comment 4

[Mahadev Majaladar]

(In reply to Mahadev Majaladar from comment #3)
> Suppose, I have implemented Firefox push notification on my website. My
> website visitor will see permission at top-left corner and he/she will click
> on "Always receive notifications" and then I'll save subscriber id in my
> database to send a notification to this subscriber. Right?
> 
> Later time, subscriber deletes history and of course notification permission
> setting. He/She will again see notification permission after visiting my
> website and would think like "I already was given permission to receive the
> notifications, but it is asking me again" Looks Spammy. Right?
> 
> Moreover, when the subscriber id which I have saved in my database would
> become useless.
> 
> Google Chrome/Safari understood this problem and created separate
> notification center.
> 
> What do you think, is it necessary to implement separate notification center
> in Firefox too?

ignore word when in 3rd paragraph.

Comment 5

[Panos Astithas (he/him) [:past] (please ni?)]

The problem is that in your STR from comment 0 you select "Site Preferences". Site permission data is already stored separately from cache and history data, so the current behavior is not an implementation oversight. When you choose "Site preferences" from the dialog, you indicat that site permissions should be wiped as well. This checkbox is not ticked by default for the reason that you argue, so I don't think there is anything to do here.

Comment 6

[Mahadev Majaladar]

Yes. You are right. But site preferences include all options like Allow Geolocation, Allow Popup, Allow Notification, Allow Javascript, etc. And I am talking about only Notifications.

If the user chooses to clear "Site Preferences" while clearing history, then Notification Permissions also get reset, and subscriber ids now point to the null.

If you remove Notification from "Site Preferences" while deleting history, and If you maintain different setting tab to manage notifications, It will be useful. Subscriber ids will not point to null devices(browsers), and notification subscriber, will get extra control over notifications. E.g. He can manage which websites should send him notifications and which websites shouldn't, It will improve more user experience.

See Chrome doesn't allow clearing notification setting while deleting history: http://prnt.sc/cwmlxr but
they use the different window to manage notifications: http://prntscr.com/cwmo11

Safari also does this: http://prntscr.com/cwmoj8

Even if you don't think that implementing the different setting option for notification management, will not be the good thing, just think why safari and chrome implemented that?

I would like to add one more thing, Even if Safari and Chrome browsers were closed, and If I send push notification using CURL, this browser still receives it & shows but Firefox not.

Comment 7

[Panos Astithas (he/him) [:past] (please ni?)]

This is irrelevant, Firefox has the same panel: about:preferences#content -> Notifications -> Choose. I've just verified that Safari also clears the notification permission if you clear history, so it's just Chrome that treats site permissions separately. In any case, if you don't want your site permissions to be cleared when you clear your history in Firefox, then just don't tick the Site Preferences checkbox. That's what it's there for!

Comment 8

[Mahadev Majaladar]

I can control it, I mean I'll not tick "Site Preferences" while deleting history, But my subscribers can't. I have thousands of subscribers, and each is having a different mindset, and mostly user tick all options while deleting history.I can't control it but you can. It is really good that Firefox has different notification panel. Now you just have to remove Notification preference from site preference. That's it. Believe me; it is useful. 

Safari uses the same approach as Chrome: see the video screencast: https://youtu.be/i21OQD_x-zA

Thanks