Chrome Testing Feature to Curb Annoying Push Notifications on websites

Google is testing a feature for curbing subscriptions for push notifications in its Chrome browser. The Windows Club has spotted several Chromium Gerrit commits which indicate that developers are working on a flag set to be added to Chrome’s experimental Canary 86 browser.

The flag is called #Push-Subscription-With Expiration-Time and will automatically stop subscriptions to these notifications after a certain time when enabled under chrome://flags.

This will set a default expiration time of 90 days from the date of a user’s original opt-in to receive notifications from a particular website, which means that users won’t have to manually turn off push notifications to prevent being spammed with messages when they no longer want to receive them.

The Windows Club noted that Chrome will likely implement certain UI changes to prompt users to set their push notification subscription to expire after a particular period. Chrome may also allow users to customise the expiration time according to their own preferences once the feature is available in an upcoming stable version of the browser.

Making websites less irritating

This latest feature comes as part of a years-long drive by the company to clamp down on certain irritating behaviours on websites. Most recently, the rollout of Chrome 84 in mid-July introduced the ability to block intrusive notifications such as pop-ups which encourage a user to follow a website.

By default, Chrome alerts users when a website wants to send them notifications, which they can choose to disallow. Certain websites may repeatedly generate certain pop-ups, however, which Chrome can now actively block.

Users can click on the bell icon in the address bar and select “Continue blocking” to prevent a website from showing these notifications with every visit. Additionally, Chrome will now also notify users if they are downloading executables like EXE or APK files from HTTP or HTTPS pages.