Chrome to start blocking annoying notification requests

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  Chrome's current, very annoying notification pop-up. [credit: Ron Amadeo ]

In a blog post yesterday, Google outlined plans for a less intrusive permission UI for Chrome's notification feature. Chrome's current permission UI spawns a pop-up box near the address bar, which covers Web content and is one of the many annoying pop-ups that can spawn when a website loads, alongside "subscribe to our site/newsletter" and "this site uses cookies."

Google's post says that, while notifications are "an essential capability for a wide range of applications," Chrome's permission pop-up is also "a common complaint" among users that "interrupt[s] the user's workflow and result[s] in a bad user experience." To address these complaints, Chrome 80 will introduce a quieter notification UI. Interestingly, Mozilla announced basically the same changes to Firefox recently.

The quieter UI will block notifications by default, rather than spawn a pop-up asking if users want to allow notifications or not. On the desktop, a message appears in the address bar saying "Notifications blocked," and clicking on the adjacent bell icon will allow the user to enable notifications. On mobile, there is still a pop-up, but it is less intrusive than before, being reduced to a single bar instead of a full-screen pop-up.

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