Safari 16 on macOS Ventura 13 supports standard Web Push notifications.
On the current latest version of macOS Ventura 13.1, on the current latest version of Safari 16.2, navigate to meta.discourse.org and sign in. You’ll be prompted to enable live notifications in a banner. If you click the banner, the banner disappears, but you won’t receive any notifications.
Similarly, navigate to your notifications preferences page, by clicking on your user icon in the upper right, then clicking on the profile head in the lower right corner of the new menu, then clicking Preferences, then click the “Notifications” section in the side pane of preferences (the one further down, next to your profile picture, not the one at the top of the screen with a bell icon). That brings me to https://meta.discourse.org/my/preferences/notifications
There’s a button there in the Live Notifications section to Enable Notifications, but when you click it, nothing happens.
(Note that this bug is referring to macOS, not iOS. Supposedly iOS Web Push notifications are coming later this year. I decided to test macOS push notifications, to see what the iOS version might be like in the future.)
We made some recent changes and now push notifications are the new default notification is Discourse. This is well supported in Safari nowadays, but it was disabled for historical reasons in there.
This PR removes the artificial block in Safari MacOS
The above PR was deemed too dangerous so close to the release, so we are just hiding the banner for now, and will re-enable it (and make it work) during the 3.1 beta period.
What’s a typical way to test web push notifications?
I started to try to test this by sending a private message to Discobot (@discobot roll 2d6) and then switching tabs to another site. Even in Google Chrome, I didn’t receive a push notification with Discobot’s response. (But I did receive a push notification from my iOS Discourse Hub app.)
I speculate that this has to do with the fact that I wasn’t “away,” i.e. I’d been on the site within the last fifteen minutes…? Is that how it’s supposed to work? If so, how am I supposed to test this?
That’s gotta be a good sign! But I’d still like to see, you know, an actual notification resulting from user activity. (I’d also want to see how well it works when I quit Safari, and/or when my Mac is asleep when the notification arrives.)
I got my first macOS Safari push notification today (from today’s announcement). I didn’t have the presence of mind to screenshot it, but it looked decent.
Safari wasn’t launched at the time, but I received the push notification all the same.
