Google Wants to Fix Annoying Browser Notifications

A Chrome team member is proposing a session at the upcoming TPAC 2024 conference to address the growing issue of web notification spam and user experience challenges. It specifically targets those "allow notifications" pop-ups you get when you go to certain sites on Google Chrome.

A UX designer for the Chrome team posted a plan on GitHub to make notifications feel like they're not pop-ups themselves. The goal is for Chrome to collaborate with other browser vendors and web developers to find innovative solutions for how notifications are managed on the web. The team member, known as Heisenburger on GitHub, outlined many problems that need to be fixed, like how notification permission doesn't expire. Notifications are very helpful on sites where you need a notification, like Asana, Slack, or Trello. Unfortunately, there are websites that will use this to get permission just to spam you. What adds to the problem is that turning off notifications can be frustrating and confusing once you allow it.

heisenburger GitHub

The proposal outlines solutions to address these issues. For example, one solution is just to implement a secondary panel that users can use to proactively enable notifications for specific websites. This would keep users from accidentally allowing it on websites just because they saw a Chrome notification. Another solution is to let notifications expire over time. This way, users will know if they really want notifications from that specific website and will be inclined to deny it if they've had a bad experience. A third solution is more complicated, requiring tabs to be active to get notifications, and the user can then "upgrade" the permissions to allow notifications even when the tab is inactive.

Instead of just working on its own browser, the highlight is to work with other browser companies at TPAC 2024 on a shared solution. By collaborating with other browser vendors and web developers, the user will learn to navigate this system regardless of the browser they use. The session itself is meant to be an open discussion, which should bring about even better solutions.

Source: GitHub