Chrome, Firefox to Hide Those Annoying Site Notification Prompts

Firefox and Chrome plan to hide those annoying browser notification prompts that ask you to subscribe to content when you visit many sites. Instead both browsers will display a small indicator that lets you know that a site offers notifications and you can decide if you wish to subscribe to them.

Web sites use browser notifications subscriptions to push content to your browser even when you are not visiting the site, and in some operating systems, even when your browser is not being used.

While this service was created with good intentions, it has quickly become annoying as many sites use them to spam unwanted content to your computer or make it hard to leave a page until you acknowledge the prompt.

Most notification prompts are unaccepted

In research conducted by Mozilla, almost 99% of browser notification prompts go unaccepted, with over 48% being actively declined by a visitor.

To illustrate this, Mozilla stated that in a single month, 1.45 billion prompts were shown to Firefox 63 Release users and only 23.66 million actually accepted them. 

"To add from related telemetry data, during a single month of the Firefox 63 Release, a total of 1.45 Billion prompts were shown to users, of which only 23.66 Million were accepted," Mozilla stated in a blog post. "I.e, for each prompt that is accepted, sixty are denied or ignored. In about 500 Million cases during that month, users actually spent the time to click on “Not Now”."

Even worse then being just generally annoying, many deceptive sites abuse them in order to get people to subscribe to the site's low quality browser notification spam.

Over the past year, BleepingComputer has reported on and seen a marked increase in shady sites and low quality ad networks abusing notification prompts. They do this by stating you must subscribe to browser notification in order to download a file, view a video, install a Chrome extension, or to even leave the site!

Visitors who fall for this trick will soon find notifications appearing on their desktop for adult and gambling sites, unwanted software, malicious software, and clickbait stories.

Firefox and Chrome to hide notification prompts

Mozilla plans on changing the notification prompt behavior in Firefox as part of a two-step process.

Starting in Firefox 70, notification prompts will be changed so that the default option is 'Never' instead of 'Not Now'. This will allow users to permanently block notification prompts from sites that they visit often.

In Firefox 72, all site notification prompts will be hidden and a chat bubble indicator will be shown in the address bar to indicate that the site offers notifications. Users can then click on this bubble to subscribe to the site's notifications as shown below.

As reported by Techdows.com, for a scheduled release in Chrome 79, Google is also experimenting with hiding notification prompts through an chrome://flags feature named "Quieter notification permission prompts".  

When enabled, this flag will hide notification prompts and instead display a notification in the address bar as shown below.

If a user clicks on the bell notification prompt indicator, a "Notifications blocked" dialog box will be shown that asks if you wish to allow notifications from that site.

By hiding notification prompts, browsers give users the best of both worlds. For users who detest notification prompts, you no longer have to see them, while those who enjoy them can still easily subscribe to them.