If you ask a room of developers what mobile device features are missing from the web, push notifications are always high on the list. Chrome, Safari and Mozilla were the early birds in the race, to add notification feature to their kitty. Push notifications on Internet Explorer are not enabled, however IE introduced pinned sites and live tiles, a similar tool to push notifications to users on pinned (Pre-selected) websites. It helps users to some extent but hardly helps website owners.
Push notifications allow your users to opt-in to timely updates from sites they love and allow you to effectively re-engage them with personalized, engaging content. A push notification appears as a small clickable pop-up box. Notification elements can be customized including the icon, notification title, message and the action URL. Users have an option to opt-out from receiving notifications.
Fortunately IE has considered developers request to build Push API & Service worker to enable push notification.
Service Workers (formerly Navigation Controllers) are a new system that provides event-driven scripts that run independent of web pages. They are similar to Shared Workers except that their lifetime is different and they have access to domain-wide events such as network fetches.
The Push API enables sending of a push message to a webapp via a push service. An application server can send a push message at any time, even when a webapp or user agent is inactive. The push service ensures reliable and efficient delivery to the user agent. Push messages are delivered to a Service Worker that runs in the origin of the webapp, which can use the information in the message to update local state or display a notification to the user.
Developers Response - Anonymous
I just realized that even Edge does not support server-sent events, which is a very useful feature of standard HTML5, I find that unbelievable in 2015 !
Come on Microsoft guys ! Implement it now ! At least in Edge ! (IE 11 also ?)
At this time we tell ALL our customers to switch either to Firefox or to Chrome in order to have a modern UI ... What a pity, that's part of what should be the standard! Stop being behind the competition!
