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If you’re reading this, there’s a good chance you’ve occasionally been fed up by push notifications. Now, Google is rolling out a new Chrome feature on Android and desktop to help cut through notification fatigue.
Chrome will now automatically remove notification permissions for sites you haven’t interacted with recently. The feature will only revoke permissions for sites where there’s very low user engagement and a high volume of notifications being sent, and it will not impact notifications for any installed web apps.
Chrome will inform you when notification permissions are automatically removed. If you’d like to keep getting notifications from a particular website, you can easily re-grant permission by heading to Safety Check in your Chrome browser, or by revisiting the site and enabling notifications again. You can also toggle the feature off entirely.
Google says testing showed the feature prompted a significant reduction in notification overload, but with only “a minimal change in total notification clicks.”
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(Credit: Google )
Google seems to have been taking steps lately to reduce notification overload across its entire product line. In May, YouTube began testing a feature where users would no longer receive push notifications from a particular channel if they hadn’t engaged with it recently, though the alerts would still be available via the notification inbox in the YouTube app.
The update comes as more research appears to show that more notifications don’t necessarily mean more engagement. In June, analysis by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism found that 43% of people who signed up for push notifications from news organizations like The New York Times, CNN, and The Financial Times simply turned them off because they felt they were getting too many—or irrelevant—alerts.
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I’m a reporter covering weekend news. Before joining PCMag in 2024, I picked up bylines in BBC News, The Guardian, The Times of London, The Daily Beast, Vice, Slate, Fast Company, The Evening Standard, The i, TechRadar, and Decrypt Media.
I’ve been a PC gamer since you had to install games from multiple CD-ROMs by hand. As a reporter, I’m passionate about the intersection of tech and human lives. I’ve covered everything from crypto scandals to the art world, as well as conspiracy theories, UK politics, and Russia and foreign affairs.
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