On Friday, the tech giant announced a new feature that will automatically disable browser notifications for websites you haven’t interacted with recently, disrupting their ability to display alerts and updates that you may no longer care about or even bother with.
The feature will launch on Chrome on Android and on desktop. This feature extends Chrome’s existing Safety Checkup features, which revoke camera and location permissions for websites you no longer visit.
The company quietly acknowledges that browser notifications, as they were designed, may have been a bad idea, saying its own data shows that users receive a lot of notifications but rarely interact with them. Google notes that less than 1% of all notifications result in any user complaints.
Unwanted notifications have been a problem for users for years. For example, on iPhones, Apple was forced to add controls that allowed users to send push notifications to the daily summary, mute them, or turn them off entirely within the notification itself, as users became increasingly dissatisfied with the notification system.
Google says it will inform users when it’s removing notification permissions, allowing users to change the setting back, if they prefer.
The feature had been in testing ahead of today’s official launch. Google found that these changes didn’t significantly impact the total number of clicks on notifications, an indication that people weren’t really engaging much with these pop-ups to begin with.
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