Our relationship with push notifications has been rather circuitous...
- First Andrew (@psychobunny) tried plain desktop notifications via the Notification API (that's the desktop notifications plugin), but notification delivery stopped when you closed your browser.
- Then I wrote the PushBullet plugin, but they went from free to paid and that went out the window
- Around that time I wrote the Firebase plugin, which was a dead end because there was no iOS support.
- I then wrote the ntfy plugin, which works really well, but does rely on a freemium third-party service and app (written by @binwiederhier@discuss.ntfy.sh)
Thanks to some recent discussion from @crazycells and @bh4-tech, I learned that the Push API had reached general availability across most modern browsers. In fact, this actually happened over a year ago, so compatibility should be even better.
So I set about working on yet another push notifications plugin, hopefully for the last time, and this time using the native Push API on the client-side.
To enable them, simply navigate over to the "Push Notifications" menu item in your user profile, and flip the switch.

So, let's dogfood! I de-activated the ntfy plugin on this site and activated the web-push plugin so you can try it out right now.
The plugin is in the proof-of-concept phase, so there might (read: most definitely will be) issues. Please let me know any you find here.
The plugin also successfully removes notifications if they're no longer relevant (e.g. queued posts that have already been handled), and merges notification content just like it does in-app:
v0.7.0 of the Push Notification plugin has been released
develop
branchjulian when does 3.10 come out? 😁
phenomlab Right now :laughing:
julian Hmm - still not working for me... :-(
EDIT - works on my Android phone, but not on my PC - guessing it's likely security software. EDIT 2 - suspicion confirmed. It's caused by NordVPN. If running, the push notification doesn't work - if disabled, it works fine.
phenomlab said in Native Push Notifications Support for NodeBB: > NordVPN
Thanks for closing the loop! Kind of annoying that NordVPN blocks them...