Google’s Chrome web browser is becoming much less noisy.
On Friday, the tech giant announced a new feature that automatically disables browser notifications for websites you haven’t recently interacted with and disables the ability to pop up alerts and updates that are no longer of interest to you.
This feature launches in Chrome on Android and on the desktop.
This feature expands on the existing functionality already available in Chrome’s Safety Check feature, which revoke camera and location permissions from websites you no longer visit.
The company has tacitly acknowledged that browser notifications, as designed, may have been a bad idea, saying its own data shows that users receive tons of notifications but take little action on them. According to Google, less than 1% of notifications receive interaction from users.
Still, the tech giant believes that some notifications can be useful, so it won’t revoke notifications for installed web apps, but only for sites with low user engagement and a high number of notifications. This change alone could prompt spam websites that push a large number of notifications to reconsider the number of alerts they send to avoid losing access completely.
Unwanted notifications are a problem that consumers have faced for years. On the iPhone, for example, growing consumer dissatisfaction with the notification system forced Apple to add controls that allow users to send push notifications to their daily summaries, mute push notifications, or turn off notification messages altogether.
Google says it will notify users when it removes notification permissions and give them the option to restore the settings if they wish. If users don’t want Google’s intervention, they can also choose to turn off this automatic undo feature completely, the company said.
This feature was in testing prior to today’s official release. Google found that these changes did not have a significant impact on the total number of clicks on notifications. This shows that people don’t really engage with these pop-ups in the first place.
