Google has announced that Chrome 80 will come with a quieter permission UI for web notifications. The announcement was made on the same day that Mozilla pushed Firefox 72 which also includes a change to make notification requests a lot less intrusive. Chrome 80 has several ways in which the quieter UI will be enabled, one manual and two automatic.
If you know you’ve definitely had enough of notification requests, Chrome 80 will allow you to head to Settings > Site Settings > Notifications and then enable ‘Use quieter messaging’. If you don’t want to touch the settings yourself, you can let Chrome handle things for you; those who repeatedly deny notifications across websites will be automatically enrolled in the quieter notifications UI. Finally, if users visit a website with a notification prompt that others typically deny then new users will no longer see the prompt either.
In order to improve the experience of a website, Google recommends that developers read about best practices when requesting notifications. According to the firm, alerts issued by a site when someone first arrives are typically denied; Google says that users should understand the context and see a benefit in accepting notifications before they’re prompted to accept them.
Website maintainers can test the new conditions by manually enabling chrome://settings/content/notifications. It said the feature is gradually rolling out to Canary, Dev, and Beta channels and can be force-enabled in Chrome 80+ by heading to chrome://flags/#quiet-notification-prompts.
Later in 2020, Google said it plans to enable additional enforcement against websites that use notifications to deceive users, push ads, or malware. It said it will detail the steps it'll take in a future blog post. The quiet notifications that are going to be introduced in Chrome 80 will be available on both desktop and mobile.
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