Chrome 80 will mute a common and annoying notification complaint for many users

For all of its greatness, there are tons of things that can be flat-out annoying about using the internet. Pop-up ads, poor mobile experiences, slow load times, and poor UI are just a handful of things that contribute to a less-than-stellar experience while browsing the web. One of the bigger complaints leveraged at the modern online experience has to do with a pop-up we’ve all seen and likely dismissed hundreds of times: the allow notifications from the website box.

While there are sites that use their own custom ways of prompting users for notification acceptance, there are quite a few sites that forego any of those niceties and simply call up the generic notification request at some point in your browsing time on the site. It is irritating most times and usually unprovoked, creating an unnecessary interruption in the overall site experience. I don’t want to thrown shade on every site that offers notifications as there are tons of them that do it well and add value. This all mainly applies to the sites that are abusing the prompt.

Google and Mozilla are both rolling out updates to help curb this issue, and we really love what Chrome 80 will be doing with these pop-up boxes in the near future. According to the Chromium Blog:

Chrome 80 will show, under certain conditions, a new, quieter notification permission UI that reduces the interruptiveness of notification permission requests. In Chrome 80, users will be able to opt-in to the new UI manually in Settings. In addition, the quieter UI will be automatically enabled for users under two conditions: first, for users who typically block notification permission requests and second, on sites with very low opt in rates. The automated enrollment will be enabled gradually after the Chrome 80 release while we gather user and developer feedback.

Shop ASUS Chromebook C436 at Chrome Shop

So, over time, instead of seeing that annoying pop-up, user will get a new, less intrusive prompt to allow notifications from the website in question. That new UI will happen automatically if you’ve opted out of similar requests before or if the website already has a low opt-in rate. Either way, your notification will go from the pic above to something more like this:

This gives web developers the ability to still allow notifications in the ways that are good for users, but keeps users from getting bombarded by these requests on a site-by-site basis. I’m curious to see how this will function on sites that have a seperate notification opt-in triggered on their site. Those are usually a bit more user friendly and thoughtfully placed, but still require an interaction with the browser-based pop-up seen above to seal the deal. Will those actions still prompt the older pop up or the new UI? We aren’t sure, but it seems Google will be rolling this out slowly with Chrome 80, collecting both developer and user feedback before making this a wide-spread, always on feature.

SOURCE: Chromium Blog