Every once in a while, there is browser news that impacts analytics or functionality that isn’t really enough to warrant its own dedicated post, so when this occurs I’ll be doing a “round up” style post.
Let’s run down the list shall we?
Safari Changes it’s User Agent on iPad OS.
On December 20th – the Webkit Blog confirmed the following change:
“With the exception of iPad mini, Safari on iPad will now send a user-agent string that is identical to Safari on macOS”
https://webkit.org/blog/9674/new-webkit-features-in-safari-13/
This means any device specific reports will be different for device breakdown. If you’ve been tracking this and are seeing less iPad traffic since September 20th, 2019 – this would be the reason.
This also means that any site functionality which was parsing the user agent to determine tablet traffic is going to misclassify most iPad traffic. Such functionality should be reviewed.
Notification Prompts are put on Notice
Mozilla has issued a statement that the latest release of Firefox (Jan 7th, 2020) will block notification windows by default to prevent them annoying users. They cited that
“Last year, we discovered during testing that about 99% of notification prompts go unaccepted, with 48% being actively denied by the user.” as justification.
https://blog.mozilla.org/firefox/block-notification-requests/
Chrome joined in and on Jan 7th released a blog post on changes they will be making to UX going forward. Specifically, they are developing a ‘quieter UI’ in which they will make adjustments to how the site may display notifications as part of their R89 release (slated Feb). This will be off by default, except in the following cases:
“…the quieter UI will be automatically enabled for users under two conditions. First, for users who typically block notification permission requests and second, on sites with very low opt in rates. The automated enrollment will be enabled gradually after the release while we gather user and developer feedback.”
https://blog.chromium.org/2020/01/introducing-quieter-permission-ui-for.html
So if Google notices that no one accepts your notifications anyway, then they’ll actively suppress new users from being interrupted by them going forward. They strongly recommend developers test their user flows with the settings enabled.
Between the two sets of updates it’ll be important to really consider the use of notifications before using them, as they will no longer result in a unified experience cross-browser.