I promise that I have never asked for a notification or a pop-up. They 'work' from the point of view of web sites and browser vendors, maybe more so than from the perspective of users.
I promise that I have never asked for a notification or a pop-up.
Very few people ask for a specific implementation of a feature unless they want you to clone something they've seen elsewhere. People don't do that.
In user focus groups I've been in though users have told me that they find it hard to know when they need to pay attention to something, or when they've been tagged in to something, or to know when a server side task has completed, or when a long-running webworker process has completed. All of those things are obvious use cases for some sort of notification, and when the feature has been implemented users both enable them and click on them.
Heck, I got a Google Calendar notification pop-up while I was writing this comment.
The problem is that you don't want notifications so you want them to be removed from browsers and then no one gets notifications even if they want them. That's not reasonable. The answer is that you need to be able to block them easily; to turn that feature off for yourself. This exists (in Chrome) - chrome://settings/content/notifications You can disable them for all sites. And yet you'd rather complain that they exist instead.
Turn off notifications by default so that people who need/want them (the minority) can get them from the relevant sites (the exceptions).
After that turn off stickies, floaters, modals, etc by default & those who wish to have their browsing experience assaulted into a 1 inch box can opt in.
