1803416 - Support Windows Notification Service for delivering push notifications when Firefox is not running

Status: NEW

(Toolkit :: Alerts Service, enhancement)

Description

[Nick Alexander :nalexander [he/him]]

Right now, Firefox Desktop communicates with the Mozilla push service (autopush) via a persistent web socket: ultimately, this is determined by https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/rev/a4a41aafa80bf38f6e456238a60781fed46f9d08/modules/libpref/init/all.js#3426

pref("dom.push.serverURL", "wss://push.services.mozilla.com/");

This means that we can't launch Firefox to service push notifications, in the manner that we launch GeckoView based applications (via Google FCM).

Windows purports to support push notifications via the Windows Notification Service, including support for Win32 (non-UWP) applications: see https://github.com/microsoft/WindowsAppSDK/issues/334 and https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/apps/windows-app-sdk/notifications/push-notifications/push-quickstart.

This ticket tracks figuring out if this can be made to work in Firefox at the client level, perhaps with a personal Azure account.

Comment 1

[Nick Alexander :nalexander [he/him]]

Attachment: WIP: Bug 1803416 - Part 1: WindowsAppSDK toolchain. r?glandium

This follows an approach suggested
here.

Comment 2

[Nick Alexander :nalexander [he/him]]

Attachment: WIP: Bug 1803416 - Part 2: Add a WindowsAppSDK-based `pushproxy` binary.

This stub executable demonstrates that it is possible to consume the
Windows App SDK in the Firefox build system. If the user has the
Windows App SDK runtime installed, launching pushproxy.exe will
register a WNS channel (for now, with my (nalexander's) personal Azure
WNS details). Pushing messages to that WNS URI will then deliver, or
launch and deliver, the push proxy. In the future, such messages
would be routed to Firefox for consumption.

Comment 3

[Nick Alexander :nalexander [he/him]]

The WIP patches I posted are my experiments toward consuming the Windows App SDK within the Firefox build system. The resulting pushproxy.exe binary could be part of the Firefox WNS architecture; more to come as I write things down.