Microsoft's customer surveys found that people hate browser notifications, so it's suggesting a "quiet notification requests" option, which is not unlike the way Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox have turned off annoying notifications.
Microsoft's update to silent notification requests arrived in Chromium-based Edge version 84, which was released this week. It's enabled by default, but users can disable it at the URL edge://settings/content/notifications.
Instead of showing the full notification request, you can now hide it behind a bell icon in the address bar.
“With ‘quiet requests’ enabled, website notification requests made through Notifications or Push API will appear as a bell with the words ‘Notifications blocked’ in the address bar, as opposed to the standard display,” Microsoft Edge team members explain.
Microsoft says its approach is aimed at users who generally don't see the value of notifications from a website, but may also depend on them for meeting alerts from a calendar web app or updates from media they like.
Placing notifications behind the bell icon allows the user to click on “notifications blocked” to see and accept the request for that particular website.
“We chose to enable this setting by default for users in Microsoft Edge 84 due to the high volume of user regarding unwanted notifications,” Microsoft says.
In fact, Microsoft’s approach to notification spam is a bit different than Google. It started blocking notifications entirely in Chrome 80 in February, instead hiding them behind a bell icon in the address bar. Mozilla did the exact same thing in Firefox 72 in 2019.
Apple’s Safari doesn’t block notification requests by default, but users can go to Safari Preferences > Websites > Notifications and then deselect “Allow websites to ask for permission to send notifications.” This prevents Safari from displaying the requests.
However, Microsoft is also working on a different approach, “enabling full notification display when data suggests that users find a site’s specific notification request valuable.”
Microsoft hasn't explained how it will determine this or when it will enable the feature, but it says users could keep notification requests quiet if they prefer.
