Microsoft Edge Will Get Smarter At Handling Website Notifications

We’re sure that you’ve come across many websites that prompt you whether or not you want to receive notifications. This is a useful feature if there are websites that you follow and want to get updates from, but at the same time, it can be annoying to see that request popup everytime you visit a website.

Microsoft seems to understand this and will be introducing some changes in its Edge browser, where it will make the browser “smarter” at handling these notifications. This will be done by crowdsourcing how the general public feels about said notifications, so if the majority of users are choosing not to receive notifications from a website, Microsoft will take that into account and compile it into an annoyance score.

If the score is high enough, Edge would assume that this isn’t something that users want from that particular website, and will automatically quiet notifications from the website. Of course, given that this is crowdsourced information, there is a chance that you could still see those notifications if the score isn’t high or sufficient enough for Edge to make a decision for you.

According to Microsoft, “We will use updated data regularly so sites can provide the full prompt to their users when they get better acceptance rates from their users. This should be a strong motivator for sites to follow best practices and request notifications when they think users are most likely to accept. For sites providing quiet requests, we will provide random chance of providing the full prompt so we can continue to measure whether the site should provide the full prompt with improved user experience.”

Tyler Lee
Categories: General
Tags: edge, Microsoft