'Enable Notifications' button in user preferences doesn't work on Tor Browser 8.0.3

[mig5]

Hi,

The ‘Enable Notifications’ button in a user’s preferences does not stay enabled when using Tor Browser (latest version, 8.0.3).

When clicking the blue bar along top of screen ‘Do you want to enable live notifications’, that does temporarily enable notifications.

However, in the preferences area, the button says ‘Enable notifications’, and clicking on it does nothing at all.

Also, if you open another tab but on the same Discourse site, you are presented once again with the blue banner ‘do you want to enable notifications’. Same if you logout and log back in. So the user continually gets prompted to enable notifications even though they did.

In other browsers (including native Firefox, which Tor Browser is based on), the button responds and the setting ‘sticks’ (the button would now say ‘Disable notifications’).

This was discovered on a forum with Discourse version v2.2.0.beta3 +56, but I reproduce it on https://try.discourse.org as well as here on meta.

I also tried uninstalling all browser add-ons, but it didn’t help.

I reproduce it in Tor Browser 8.0.3 on both Linux and Mac.

In the debugger, I don’t see any Javascript errors or any form of message at all, when I click on the button.

Please let me know if I can provide any other info, however you are encouraged to download Tor Browser 8.0.3 and try reproduce it yourself on try.discourse.org or other Discourse forums.

Thanks!

[codinghorror (Jeff Atwood)]

Since this feature works on all other known desktop browsers (Edge, Safari, Firefox, Chrome), wouldn’t it make more sense to open this as a bug on Tor Browser?

[mig5]

Sure, I’ll do that too. Since it’s your feature (and without knowledge of what underpins it) - e.g it’s not like clicking buttons doesn’t work in Tor Browser in general - I figured I’d ask here first.

Thanks for your response

[Falco]

Tor Browser is based on Firefox ESR. Firefox 52 ESR disabled the service workers & push notifications to make it easier to handle updates.

[mig5]

Thanks very much for the clarification! I’ll just disable the prompt banner as our forum has a lot of Tor Browser users, and it sounds like we won’t be able to do much about it. Seems the users can still enable notifications via their user preferences if they are using a different browser, so all is not lost.