Fighting Unwanted Notifications with Machine Learning in Chrome
20 comments
·May 8, 2025CommenterPerson
fluidcruft
At work we have to use these Citrix environments on thin clients with sessions that get nuked after a few hours of disuse. Nothing trains you to muscle-memory to Edge quite like avoiding the whole Chrome onboarding experience every few hours. Edge is annoying too but much easier to ignore. You click the shit and get a URL bar not this whole amnesiac Googleverse login spiel. Edge annoys you to login, too but the annoyance at least GTFOs of the way.
gruez
>The second most are the "sign in with Google" pop-ups on many many websites. My answer is, "NEVER".
That's not even a chrome thing. I see it in firefox as well.
tmerc
Would rather have extension manifest V2 still work. That had the power to stop unwanted notifications by user choice.
driverdan
> Notifications in Chrome are a useful feature...
They lost me right there. They are not a useful feature and should not exist.
hedora
Here is proof that it is an intentionally-bad feature:
Web pages can tell if you enabled notifications.
The last time I checked, Slack used this to break unrelated functionality until you gave it browser notification permission, and re-broke itself if you disabled permissions after enabling them. Otherwise, there is no reason to enable it or install the app. (You can deny notifications per app, at least on apple platforms).
afavour
They’re plenty useful when used by a service you engage with. I run Slack as a tab in my browser rather than as a standalone app and browser notifications make that usable.
technion
One of the most impactful things I've done with enterprise security, and I mean moreso than buying any expensive product, was deployed a browser policy that disabled browser notifications (and deployed ublock). Service desk calls from people claiming to have been hacked because their browsers kept popping up scare ware ads dropped to nothing overnight, with a notable drop in complaints and absolutely zero complaints logged about people who wanted notifications on something. It's obscene, the desktop notification feature has generated more work for security people than active directory and it's lack of mfa support.
mey
Has anyone come across a notification they found _useful_? (Aside from the recent April fools xkcd one).
Seems like you don't need an ML system here, just an expert system, which is just, always reject.
hedora
Firefox onboarding is fine, fwiw.
kevingadd
For web apps I can imagine good uses for notifications, like how I have a Google Calendar tab pinned and it's useful for it to be able to alert me that I have a meeting in 15 minutes.
But for websites? Can't think of anything.
accurrent
I wish we could time limit notifications, like it'd be nice to allow notifications to an app for a fixed time period (say a barber queueing app) but I dont want to see ads served by them outside of that time period.
ocdtrekkie
We do not need to boil the oceans to decide what notifications are spam: We need to recognize the notifications API was a bad idea and should either deprecate it entirely or, like Safari, only permit it for apps installed to the home screen.
hdjrudni
I think it has its uses. For apps. I've been meaning to add notifications to my app but I haven't gotten around to it. It's a b2b so it'd be strictly for their benefit, I don't get anything out of it.
It's just a very, very small # of apps have useful enough notifications that I'd want to enable them. I wish there was some other way to present "This app supports notifications" and allow users to opt in that wasn't quite so intrusive. Or maybe require that the user spends at least 10 minutes on the site/app before its allowed to show the popup or something. I don't know. The little RSS icons we used to have are maybe not quite noticeable enough.
mook
I've seen it useful for things like logs of long running build jobs. But the API should have been done so that notifications can only be registered upon user action, like how pop-up window detection works.
But to a first approximation, a function that always returns "no" will probably be close enough for most users. Somehow I don't think their priorities align with mine.
cosmic_cheese
To me the easiest fix is to just default notifications to off for all sites, remove the prompt, and if the user wants to turn on notifications for a particular site they can do so manually. Keeps the functionality while making it impractical for sites to harass users into approving and defeats those stupid in-site “we need to maintain the ability to prompt the user” pre-prompts all in one swoop.
inquirerGeneral
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curtisszmania
[dead]
The Most Unwanted Notification in Chrome is the annoying pop-up that asks if I want to make Chrome my default browser. The second most are the "sign in with Google" pop-ups on many many websites. My answer is, "NEVER".
The internet monopolists sound like they have gotten desperate, trying to monetize, capture, and surveil the last few independent users. Sooner you are broken up the better!
-- Happy Duck user