Firefox wants to take care of annoying browser notification spam once and for all

Mozilla’s latest experiment to cut down on desktop notifications has resulted in a new approach that could work out effectively. Starting with Firefox 72 that comes out next year in January, users will have to enable notification prompts in the browser on every website before the webpage throws a notification permission prompt. [caption id=“attachment_7612711” align=“alignnone” width=“1280”]  Mozilla Firefox web browser. Image: Mozilla.[/caption] In a detailed blog post explaining its experiment, Mozilla said that a small permission icon will appear in the address bar. Every notification permission will be denied by Firefox automatically and to enable it, users have to click on this icon to view the prompt. Controlled research by Mozilla discovered that 99 percent of notification prompts are ignored while 48 percent of them are actively denied. In its testing with telemetry data on Firefox 63 over a month, about 1.45 billion prompts were sent out of which only 23.66 million were accepted. Until Firefox 72 arrives, certain changes are being added to notification settings. In Firefox, when a user visits a website that sends notifications, a prompt selection comes up asking whether the user wants to allow a prompt. Currently, it shows ‘Not Now’ but it will show the notification every time the website is visited. In version 70 and onwards, this option will be replaced with ‘Never Allow’ so that the notifications will be hidden forever until the user changes it manually.