Hey, did you know that you can subscribe to websites in your web browser to receive notifications when new content is available? You probably did… because over the last few years millions of websites have added annoying pop-ups that prompt you to sign up for notifications. And unsurprisingly, the vast majority of people either ignore those pop-ups or click the “not now” option.

That’s according to research from the folks at Mozilla… who have announced that they’re going to tackle this new form of pop-up spam in future versions of Firefox by hiding the permission prompts by default.

When Firefox 72 ships in January, 2020 it’ll require user interaction before it displays a permission prompt.

In other words, when you visit a website that wants to show you the “subscribe for notifications” notification… nothing will happen unless you intentionally click a little chat icon in the URL bar to bring up the notification permission prompt.

As a long-time Chrome user, this might be enough to make me considering switching back to Firefox.

While the new behavior is set to debut in Firefox 72, Mozill has already taken a baby step toward improving the user experience — Firefox 70, which shipped last week, replaces the “not now” option with “never allow,” so that once you tell your browser that you don’t want to receive notifications for a website, you’ll never be asked again.

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6 replies on “Firefox to hide notification permission pop-ups”

  1. Firefox is probably the most important software on the net right now as everyone piles into chromium and as some demand firefox do the same, sure hope they never do.

    But firefox profile management is unnecessarily clunky. I really wish they’d smooth it out. And I wish all browser makers would sandbox far more. Getting anything into or out of a browser should be like, at least in the background, getting things into or out of a virtual machine. It should be downright impossible for malvertising to infect anyone at this point.

    Publishers would benefit more than anyone from solid protection like that, but browser makers don’t seem to give an airborne rodent’s posterior about vulnerable readers or the publishers whose ads they see less of.

  2. Can’t you just go to chrome://settings/content/notifications and uncheck the “Ask Before Sending” button to disable this on Chrome? I did that about a month ago and they all went away.

  3. It won’t prevent them from creating annoying popups prompting you to click that icon though.

    At least when it was a browser-rendered notification it was possible to deny it in site permissions. If they drive site owners to create in-site nags, it actually makes things worse. 🙁

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