Browser Push Notification – HTTP vs HTTPs

Overview

Browser Push Notifications use Service Workers to pass the data from a Website to the Website Integrated platform.

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Browser Push Notifications work only on HTTPs sites

Now the question comes why only on HTTPs sites.

Services workers are scripts that our browser runs in the background, separate from the web page. They are responsible for passing the data from your Browser to the integrated platform.

Now since Service Workers pass data, anyone can tamper the data being passed, falter connections. To avoid this, you can use Service Workers with web pages over HTTPs, so that you know the data being passed is not faltered or tampered with.

Benefits of using HTTPs Website

Using HTTPs Website will have the following upper hand compared to HTTP Website while Browser Push Notification Integration:

• Website users will have to click on the first Opt-In and their Website Token gets captured. As compared to HTTP, there’s one step less to Subscribe. This generally means, you will get more Subscribers since it’s a one-step less
• Push Notifications will be seen coming from your domain.
• You can directly trigger Browser Push Notification permission request on the page the Website user lands.

Using HTTP Website

You can use JS code on a HTTP website if:

• Some websites do not use HTTPs exclusively. They might have a combination of HTTP and HTTPs pages.
• Some websites don’t use HTTPs at all. Some use HTTP only.

Limitations of using HTTP Website

• Your Browser Push Notification will not come from your domain. It will come from some other sub-domain. Say, yourwebsite.netcorepush.com
• You will get less subscribers. Since, theres an extra step to subscribe to a Browser Push Notification, the chances are likely that users will not go to pop-up to subscribe.