1788638 - Notification permission status is permanently remembered in Normal Browsing Mode

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Firefox :: Site Permissions, defect)

Description

[Emma Zühlcke [:emz]]

T2-3 : In Firefox on Windows, Linux, and macOS, the notification permission status is permanently remembered in Normal Browsing Mode.

This bug is from the report in Bug 1784741.

Comment 1

[BugBot [:suhaib / :marco/ :calixte]]

The severity field is not set for this bug.
:pbz, could you have a look please?

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Comment 2

[Emma Zühlcke [:emz]]

This seems like expected behavior. We can't use temporary permissions here since notifications are supposed to also work if the website isn't open. Temporary permissions in Firefox are bound to the lifetime of a browser (tab). Seems like an odd use-case to support. Gijs, do you think we can WONTFIX this?

Comment 3

[:Gijs (he/him)]

(In reply to Paul Zühlcke [:pbz] from comment #2)

This seems like expected behavior. We can't use temporary permissions here since notifications are supposed to also work if the website isn't open. Temporary permissions in Firefox are bound to the lifetime of a browser (tab). Seems like an odd use-case to support. Gijs, do you think we can WONTFIX this?

Sorry, I'm lacking some context here. Some questions:

What does "permanent" in the summary mean here? Do those persist after a restart? I thought we had in-memory permissions which (I presume) would last until the browser is quit/restarted?

How do we communicate the permission request to the user? (ie is it clear they're opting in permanently?)

What do other browsers do here?

Comment 4

[Emma Zühlcke [:emz]]

Both Chrome and Safari grant this permission persistently (across sessions).
We do too, see https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/rev/17349477695facefe7d180d7afc2b74a965c21db/browser/modules/PermissionUI.jsm#1122
Our in-memory site permissions (TemporaryPermissions) are usually tied to the lifetime of the tab, not the session. There are exceptions to this, e.g. private browsing where all grants are session-only, controlled via the permission manager.
Our UI doesn't explicitly state that the permission is permanent. You can see it by going to permission.site and clicking the "Notification" button.

Comment 5

[:Gijs (he/him)]

Yeah I'm not sure I see the value of doing this session-only as the "whole point" of a desktop notification is normally that it's going to need to be able to talk to you at a time determined by the site, rather than the user. If you're OK with that you need to accept it might not be this session. So wontfix seems reasonable to me.

Comment 6

[Emma Zühlcke [:emz]]

Sounds good to me. Thank you for chiming in!