Firefox and Chrome Developers Decide to Automatically Hide Pop-up Notifications

The new approach will help fight spam and make web surfing safer.

Web developers use pop-up notifications so often that browser developers have decided to change their approach to managing such elements. The upcoming Firefox and Chrome versions will allow users to block all pop-up notifications on all websites by default. Thus, they will not need to opt out of receiving notifications for each website, but can allow them for the few ones they trust.

Notifications like these are not only annoying, but can also serve as a spamming tool.

The statistics gathered by Mozilla show that 97% of users reject most pop-up notifications. To make its users’ lives more comfortable, Firefox will disallow all notifications, and there will be an icon in the address bar informing a user that notifications are blocked. If a user wants to enable notifications, he can do so by clicking on the icon.

The developers are planning to implement the new policy in Firefox 72 scheduled to be released in early 2020. However, already in Firefox 70 “Not now” option for showing notifications will be replaced by “Never”.

Similar innovations are planned to be implemented in Google Chrome Version 79. The blocking of notifications will be managed via chrome: // flags and using “Quieter notification permission prompts” option.