Microsoft Edge is crowdsourcing data to show or hide notification requests

Microsoft is trying a new solution to the persistent “I would like to allow notifications from this site” requests you see on the Internet: crowdsourcing data about which people block and which people allow. According to a blog post today, Microsoft is calling this feature adaptive notification requests, and the company is launching on Edge 88 after receiving positive feedback from testers.

For an example of how this works, let’s say that there is a website that normally asks for notifications and nobody wants them. They will ignore the request or click the block button to ensure they never see it again. Microsoft then collects this data and will stop showing new users the notification request in the future.

In previous versions, Edge made notification requests “silent” by default, which means they would automatically be blocked and shown as a bell icon in the address bar that users could click to activate. user complaints about getting too many requests, but introducing new problems: mainly, people stopped enabling notifications, even on sites where many users used to enable them.

Image: Microsoft

The new version seeks to strike a balance between showing users notification requests that they may really want and hiding those that they do not want – those that are not deleted will automatically be “silenced”.

Microsoft is not leaving users who never want to receive requests (like me) in the cold, however: you can reactivate silent notification requests by going to Settings, Cookies and Site Permissions and then Notifications to activate them again. . Microsoft will also activate Silent Notifications automatically if you click “block” on three consecutive notification requests. Edge will also automatically block notifications from a website if a user rejects a request with the X button three times in a row or ignores it by clicking elsewhere on the page four times in a row.

If you don’t use Edge, but we are at the limit of all notification requests, we have a guide on how to disable them on all major browsers. However, it would be nice to see Chrome and others adopt a feature similar to this, in which notification requests that are spam and annoying are hidden, but genuinely useful ones (like, say, for Gmail) are shown to users.