This was originally posted on my own site.
After Indie Web Camp in Berlin last year, I wrote about Seb's nifty demo of push without notifications:
While I’m very unwilling to grant permission to be interrupted by intrusive notifications, I’d be more than willing to grant permission to allow a website to silently cache timely content in the background. It would be a more calm technology.
Phil Nash left a comment on the Medium copy of my post explaining that Seb's demo of using the Push API without showing a notification wouldn't work for long:
The browsers allow a certain number of mistakes(?) before they start to show a generic notification to say that your site sent a push notification without showing a notification. I believe that after ~10 or so notifications, and that’s different between browsers, they run out of patience.
He also provided me with the name to describe what I'm after:
You’re looking for “silent push” as are many others.
Silent push is something that is possible in native apps. It isn't (yet?) available on the web, presumably because of security concerns.
It's an API that would ripe for abuse. I mean, just look at the mess we've made with APIs like notifications and geolocation. Sure, they require explicit user opt-in, but these opt-ins are seen so often that users are sick of seeing them. Silent push would be one more permission-based API to add to the stack of annoyances.
Still, I'd really like silent push for the web—the ability to update a cache with fresh content as soon as it's published; that would be nifty! At the same time, I understand the concerns. It feels more powerful than other permission-based APIs like notifications.
Maybe there could be another layer of permissions. What if adding a site to your home screen was the first step? If a site is running on HTTPS, has a service worker, has a web app manifest, and has been added to the homescreen, maybe then and only then should it be allowed to prompt for permission to do silent push.
In other words, what if certain very powerful APIs were only available to progressive web apps that have successfully been added to the home screen?
Frankly, I'd be happy if the same permissions model applied to web notifications too, but I guess that ship has sailed.
Anyway, all this is pure conjecture on my part. As far as I know, silent push isn't on the roadmap for any of the browser vendors right now. That's fair enough. Although it does annoy me that native apps have this capability that web sites don't.
It used to be that there was a long list of features that only native apps could do, but that list has grown shorter and shorter. The web's hare is catching up to native's tortoise.
This was originally posted on my own site.
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