- Google Chrome is adding a new notification management feature
- Notifications will be disabled for sites you haven’t used recently.
- The tweak is rolling out to Google Chrome on desktop and Android.
Google Chrome is taking steps to reduce the number of notifications you see in your browser: Starting on desktop and Android, the app will begin turning off notification permissions for websites you “haven’t interacted with recently.”
According to Chromium Blog, the idea is that you get a quieter browsing experience that is interrupted less frequently, but you still see important notifications from the websites you use regularly. The blog states that “this feature will only revoke permissions from sites when user engagement is very low and a high volume of notifications are being sent.”
This is actually something Chrome already does for camera and location permissions. If you have given a site these access privileges and then stop visiting it, it is best to revoke the privileges for security reasons.
According to the blog post, less than 1% of notifications receive any interaction, but it is also recognized that “notifications can be really valuable and useful,” and nothing will happen to alerts from sites you visit frequently.
Notification settings
There’s no exact time frame for what actually counts as a site you haven’t interacted with recently, but you’ll see a Chrome pop-up message whenever you decide to unsubscribe from notifications for a particular website.
At that time (or any other time) you can review the list of sites authorized to send you alerts: in the desktop browser, click the three dots (top right), then Settings > Privacy and security > Site settings > Notifications. On Android, tap the three dots (top right), then Settings > Notifications.
It’s also possible to disable this new feature entirely, if you don’t want Google Chrome to interfere with any site’s notification settings, although it appears to be a useful and convenient setting that doesn’t require much administration.
Testing by the Google Chrome team “shows a significant reduction in notification overload with only minimal change in total notification clicks,” apparently, and sites that send fewer notifications actually end up receiving more clicks on them.
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