Firefox 72 taking care of your annoying browser notifications for good

Firefox is changing the way it handles notifications and annoying pop-ups, and sometime next year. In a nutshell, Firefox wants to prevent website notification spam automatically. Cracking down on the notification clutter in Firefox has been on Mozilla's to-do list since April. As part of that plan, Firefox 72 will seek user interaction on all notification permission prompts.

But how will that be different from the current system?

Starting Firefox 72, users will not receive a pop-up notification asking them to subscribe to notifications. Instead, users will have to figure out a way to subscribe to notifications themselves, only if they want. This is expected to reduce the distraction to a significant extent and users will no longer feel compelled to subscribe to notifications, against their wish.

What's the problem?

The influx of notifications sometimes causes the web browser to freeze while at times, it also hampers our productivity, which can be super annoying. This is often the case when you are trying to read an interesting article online, and before you can even finish the first sentence, your web browser application starts pestering you to subscribe to notifications.

Even worse, some website can also be extremely persistent in forcing users to subscribe to notifications or get restricted from accessing the site content otherwise. This kind of annoyance kills significantly affects user experience. Here's how to disable annoying browser notifications for good.

READ | Tips & Tricks: How to disable annoying browser notifications for good

Changes

While Firefox 70 replaced the default 'Not Now' option with 'Never' that hides the prompt on a page forever, Firefox 72 will require user interaction to show notification permission prompts. As Firefox explains, users can always the small permission icon that appears in the address bar. This way, Firefox hopes to reduce the distraction by directly allowing users to decide whether they want to subscribe to those notification alerts.

"We want websites to use in-content controls to enable notifications, as long as they have an informative style and do not try to mimic native browser UI. Faking (“spoofing”) browser UI is considered a security risk and will be met with stronger enforcement in the future," Firefox said in its blog post.

"A good pre-prompt follows the style of the page and adds additional context to the request. Pre-prompting, when done well, will increase the chance of users opting to receive notifications. Annoying users, as our data shows, will lead to churn," it added.