Notifications requests getting less intrusive in Chrome and Firefox

There was a time when pop-up ads would just fill up your computer screens, but the web has come a long way from those kinds of ads. But pop-ups are not completely removed as some of them are actually critical to the user like the permission to use cookies and send notifications.

But most users express distaste in websites sending them notifications and they usually say “No” almost every time such requests pop-up. The good news is that browsers are finally making some changes to this and implementing more user-friendly ways to ask users’ permission.

Firefox has made this possible with the help of a dialog chat icon in the address bar and when a site requests to send notifications, users can simply choose to ignore it completely and if the site asks again, the icon will notify the user discretely. But the user can always continue to ignore this altogether.

In the case of Google Chrome, the process is a bit complex. Mainly users have to voluntarily opt for a quieter notification request beginning with Chrome software version 80. But also that setting will be automatically triggered under certain circumstances like if the user tends to block notifications most of the time. Chrome will take that into consideration and implement the quieter messaging mode by itself and notify the user about it.

Interestingly, Google also does the same if the user is visiting a site whose notification requests are almost always blocked by users. This has irritated some sites, but Google says that these websites will be unblocked from the list if their acceptance rate improves over time.