Google Chrome is Reportedly Working on Making the Notification Requests "Quieter"

Almost every site that you visit these days bombards you with notification requests and what’s even worse is when they take over most of the screen space in the form of dialogs on Chrome for Android. Thankfully, Google has started working on possible solutions to this problem for Chrome and Chrome OS.

According to some sources from XDA-Developers, a new flag is being added to Chrome for Android that would make notification requests significantly “quieter” or less disturbing than a standard alert.

Thus, the quieter permission prompts upon being activated for notification permission requests will cause the sites to replace the standard notifications dialog with a quieter version.

The flag has three separate “enabled” options for managing the web notifications prompt. The first option Enabled will let Chrome issue silent push notifications to your device to alert you about a notification request getting blocked. The second option Enabled (heads-up notifications) is more or less the same as the first option with the exception of displaying push notifications on the screen as a “heads-up” for a limited amount of time.

A manage button for redirecting you to Chrome’s Site Settings page for the particular website will also be included along with the notification, from where you will be able to unblock the notifications.

Speaking about the last option Enabled (mini-infobars), it will display an infobar in place of pushing notifications, with the text “Notifications blocked” to indicate that the notification requests have been blocked by Chrome. A “manage” button for unblocking notifications and a “Details” button to study more about this option will also be available with the bar.



For Desktop versions of Chrome and Chrome OS, Google is trying to make some changes to deal with the notification requests as well. The same flag that has been added for Android will also be used for other versions of Chrome but with two options for “quieter” notification prompts.


Both the options will likely display an icon in the address bar to signify when a notification request gets blocked by Chrome. One of the options will make use of a sliding animation to display the “Notifications blocked” message. Upon clicking the icon, users will be told about the notification requests getting automatically blocked by Chrome. An option to unblock notifications for the specific site will also be available.

On desktop, Google Chrome can automatically block notifications for certain users, judging by how frequently they decline the notification requests.

As helpful as these flags sound, the option to block notification requests is still not ready to be rolled out and is being tested at the moment. In case everything goes smoothly, it could be introduced along with Chrome 78 in Chrome for Android, desktop and Chrome OS.

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