push notifications

Sometimes the seesaw of web tech is fascinating. Service workers have arrived, and beyond offline networking (read Jeremy's book) which is possibly their best feature, they can enable push notifications via the Push API.

I totally get the push (pun intended) to make that happen. There is an omnipresent sentiment that we want the web to win, as there should be in this industry. Losing on the web means losing to native apps on all the different platforms out there. Native apps aren't evil or anything — they are merely competitive and exclusionary in a way the web isn't. Making the web a viable platform for any type of "app" is a win for us and a win for humans.

One of the things native apps do well is push notifications which gives them a competitive advantage. Some developers choose native for stuff like that. But now that we actually have them on the web, there is pushback from the community and even from the browsers themselves. Firefox supports them, then rolled out a user setting to entirely block them.

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In the first part of this series we set up the front end with a Service Worker, a `manifest.json` file, and initialized Firebase. Now we need to create our database and watcher functions.

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You know those the little notification windows that pop up in the top right (Mac) or bottom right (Windows) corner when, for example, a new article on our favorite blog or a new video on YouTube was uploaded? Those are push notifications.

Part of the magic of these notifications is that they can appear even when we're not currently on that website to give us that information (after you've approved it). On mobile devices, where supported, you can even close the browser and still get them.

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