Consider removing maxActions

[hober]

ISTM exposing maxActions increases the fingerprinting surface of the platform to little benefit. It might be worth dropping, or perhaps not requiring implementations to expose it.

[beverloo]

In my view, the ideal number of buttons is platform (and OS version) specific as it largely depends on their presentation. Influencers include whether or not button icons are visible, horizontal or vertical stacking and/or whether they're in a drop-down menu that may hide other functionality.

Based on the sort of cross-platform inconsistency problems that developers run in to for notifications, I would personally prefer providing more information rather than less. Maybe even carefully erring towards some sort of getCapabilitiesAndImageResolutions() call. Is there a particular fingerprinting association that you're worried about that couldn't be derived from the user agent?

[annevk]

The other problem with this feature, and actions in general, is that it seems there's only one implementation.

[beverloo]

I would love to learn why other vendors haven't implemented support for actions. We're seeing that >5% of desktop and >10% of mobile notifications includes at least one.

[saschanaz]

I'm implementing actions in Firefox and I find it impractical to retrieve the actual max number of actions via a synchronous attribute, on top of the fingerprinting concern mentioned here.

Chrome returns 2 everywhere, Firefox will most probably do the same. Maybe the spec can also just define it as constant.

[annevk]

You don't think not exposing it at all is an option? With only one implementation we could just remove it.

[saschanaz]

We'll have some limitation for the number of actions, wouldn't it be confusing to silently show only the first few actions without exposing actual max number?

[annevk]

I'm not really sure how to reconcile that statement with the idea that the specification can just define it as a constant. If it's always going to return 2, people will know they can have two actions (and maybe more). They don't need that attribute for that.

[saschanaz]

Ah okay, if we go that route, I'd also vote to throw for extra actions rather than simply ignore as the current spec says:

For each entry in options["actions"], up to the maximum number of actions supported (skip any excess entries):

If it'll be 2 everywhere then we don't really get anything by silently ignoring, it only becomes a footgun.

Edit: But the current validation steps for other fields also just ignore invalid values...