When browsing the internet, you've probably enabled notifications by mistake on one or two sites—it gets especially annoying on phones since it's a pop-up that you need to manually reject. Or maybe you enabled notifications for a site you're not visiting all that often these days. Now, Chrome will help you curb all of that if you don't know how to stay on top of it.
Google is rolling out a new feature for its Chrome browser that will automatically revoke notification permissions from websites with which users have low engagement. Basically, if a website keeps sending you notifications and you're not interacting with them, Chrome will start seeing that as a sign that you're not interested in them, and will eventually disable them at some point.
According to Google's internal research, the vast majority of notifications fail to capture user attention, with less than 1% of all notifications receiving any interaction. This goes for all apps, not just notifications from your browser—I personally really only pay attention to DMs and emails. According to Google, this creates a high-disruption, low-engagement environment where genuinely useful updates can be lost in a sea of digital noise. Notifications from your browser are just one of many problems, but for some people, it can be the single biggest source of trash notifications. This seeks to curb some of that.
This functionality will be integrated into Chrome's existing "Safety Check" tool, which already performs similar permission management for sensitive access like a device's camera and location services. It will only revoke permissions for sites that meet two specific criteria: a very low level of user interaction combined with a high volume of notifications being sent. For example, if you subscribed to notifications from a tabloid that keeps sending you annoying notifications about celebrities, and you're not actively reading them, it will eventually be disabled.
The auto-revocation will not apply to any web apps (PWAs) that you've saved to your phone. When Chrome automatically removes a website's permission to send notifications, it will proactively inform you of that. If you want to revert it, you can re-grant permission either through the Safety Check menu in Chrome's settings or by simply visiting the website again and re-enabling notifications when prompted. And if you prefer complete manual control, the entire auto-revocation feature can be turned off in the browser's settings.
This will be greatly helpful for a lot of people, especially those who might be less tech-savvy and, as a result, might have their phones filled to the brim with trash notifications. The change will be launched on Chrome for Android, as well as the desktop version.
Source: Google
