Chrome 42 addresses this dilemma by allowing users to engage more deeply with the mobile web experiences that are important to them, by both opting in to receive push notifications directly from websites and easily adding regularly-visited high-quality sites to their home screen.
Push notifications from websites to Android devices.
I’m sure nothing will go wrong with this one.
Safari for Mac has had this for a while now, since Mavericks I think. When it was released, a few sites clearly jumped onboard the opportunity, mostly Apple news sites. The first time you load a site that is set to push notifications, you get a notice if you want to accept them or not. If you say NO, you’ll never get a push notification from the site again. If you say YES, you can still turn them off at any time.
It didn’t seem to catch on (after seeing the push notification a few times after the initial release, I haven’t seen one since). Presumably web sites saw that users weren’t jumping for joy for this feature and didn’t push trying to adopt the feature.
Maybe things will be a bit worse or spammier with Android, maybe they’ve set things up differently than Apple, but my guess is that it won’t go very far or be too problematic… The web is the web and people don’t want push notifications from web sites, apps are apps and people may already be receiving push notifications that are exactly the same as the web notifications on an app they’ve downloaded.
Edited 2015-04-20 23:09 UTC
One reason why Push notifications is interesting is because of WebRTC. A website can send a message to user when someone else wants to make a WebRTC video call with them.
http://www.w3.org/TR/push-api/
Yup, been seeing those notifications in both Firefox and Chromium on Linux for quite some time now.
“I’m sure nothing will go wrong with this one.”
Of course not. The web is such a friendly place.