Bug 245190 – [GLib] Support push notifications

• Component: WebKitGTK
• Status: NEW

[Merlijn Sebrechts]

Created attachment 462338 [details]
Settings screen in Epiphany

Ubuntu 22.04, Gnome Web 42.4, WebKitGTK 2.36.6

I am unable to turn on notifications in the Outlook Web App. The setting to turn it on on the website is not shown. What I have tried:

* Turn off adblock
* Turn off anti-tracking
* Turn off anti-popup
* Change user agent to chrome on Windows

None of these options make the notification settings visible.


Attached screenshots show the settings pane (https://outlook.office.com/mail/options/general/notifications) in Epiphany and in a different browser. Note how the settings to enable notifications isn't shown in Epiphany.

[Merlijn Sebrechts]

Created attachment 462339 [details]
Settings screen in a different browser

[Michael Catanzaro]

OK, so I think the problem here is these are push notifications. Take a look at https://webkit.org/blog/12945/meet-web-push/ to get an idea for how this works on Apple platforms. Setting up our own push server is surely not going to happen (even if we did, it looks like websites would just not support it) so we'd need to find a way to use push.apple.com. I'm not sure if that's possible or not, but it certainly looks like we're probably not intended to do that? Investigating that seems like the next step. I kinda suspect this is going to be yet another proprietary web feature that won't work outside the major browsers, but would love to be proven wrong....

We'd also need a new daemon equivalent to Apple's webpushd, but we are operating system developers, that would be the easy part.

[Kdwk]

https://conf.linuxappsummit.org/event/5/contributions/149/
I wonder if this might be relevant

[Michael Catanzaro]

And that leads to https://unifiedpush.org/. Haven't looked further yet but it looks like it's designed for use by applications and not by websites? Not sure.

It's very likely that whatever we implement will not be web-compatible unless we use the exact same push server Apple, Chrome, or Firefox.

[Kdwk]

I’m don’t fully understand the contents, but this page may (or may not) be helpful :

https://mozilla-push-service.readthedocs.io/en/latest/