We’ve all seen it, repeatedly – pop ups from sites asking to send you notifications when they publish content. Some sites you’re happy to have that from, but others you really don’t want it. It’s frustrating but Chrome may soon have an answer for you, offering the ability to automatically block these requests.
A new flag has been found by the team at XDA developers which points to some granular controls on notifications. Labelled quieter notification permission prompts users will seemingly have sliding scale control over what they see. Unfortunately, this is not yet ready for use:
This flag is currently not working, most likely because the code isn’t there yet, but it should be in Chrome Canary soon. It gives you a few different options: Default, Enabled, Enabled (Heads-up notifications), Enabled (mini-infobars), and Disabled.
9to5Google have gone a step further to go hunting among the future options for Chrome Desktop and ChromeOS. It appears that there will be further options appearing there too to minimise user aggravation from intrusive notifications.
Digging a little deeper, Google is also working on changing the way notification requests work for Chrome OS and desktop versions of Chrome. Using the same flag as on Android, the other versions of Chrome will have two options for “quieter” notification requests.
This is a great step forward and (provided it does get delivered) will be a relief to current web aggravations. Will you be using notification blocking in Chrome, or do you just accept these pop up notifications as normal?
Ha! No more “Ausdroid wants to send you notifications” – I find it ironic that you report this story as a good thing when your own site is just as bad for it!
I’m pretty sure you can already disable these with Chrome Group Policy. Be good to have a local option too.
I will gladly welcome and use the anti notification system.