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Chrome will soon hide those annoying website notification requests
Pop-ups might be largely a thing of the past, but the latest annoying distraction when web surfing is notification requests. These are the little boxes that pop up asking if users want to receive notifications of updates even after leaving the website.
While some sites provide a steady stream of great content you don’t want to miss out on (ahem, Android Authority), most users are not interested and deny or ignore notification requests every time they pop up. This gets old fast, as many sites ask again and again with each new visit.
Thankfully, the upcoming Chrome 80 update will eliminate this problem in an elegant way. Instead of displaying the entire notification, the Chrome browser on desktop and mobile will be able to automatically hide them, instead showing a small message saying the notifications have been blocked.
As seen above, the result is less intrusive, but still allows users to enable notifications with a simple tap or click. The blue box only appears the first time the feature kicks in, to help ease users into the new UI element.
This setting won’t be enabled by default, but can be toggled via a new “quieter messaging” option in the settings menu. For users to frequently deny notification messages (read: everyone), the quieter messaging will be turned on automatically once the update rolls out to stable Chrome.
Quieter messaging will be turned on automatically for users who frequently deny requests.
The Chrome team is also taking things a step further later this year, when it will “enable additional enforcement against abusive websites using web notifications for ads, malware or deceptive purposes.”
For now, the option is available on Beta, Dev, and Canary channels of Chrome (via 9to5Google), and can be enabled with the flag chrome://flags/#quiet-notification-prompts. For web developers who want to avoid being permanently shushed, the official Chromium blog post also outlines some best practices to improve user acceptance rates.
On top of this, it seems that Chrome will soon also add a “Game of the Day” feature that allows users to replay fan-favorite mini-games from past Google Doodles (also via 9to5Google). It’s displayed on the Chrome home page in some Dev and Canary channels on Android. No word yet on a wider rollout.
Up next: How to turn off Google Chrome notification request pop-ups