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.