How to turn off notification requests from websites in Chrome
Chrome supports native desktop notifications. This means that when you’re using a web app or service that can show notifications like Facebook, or YouTube, the notification can be delivered via your OS’ native notification system. It’s useful but almost every single website you visit tries to send you notifications and you have to dismiss it. If it annoys you, you can disable notification requests from websites in Chrome.
Turn off notification requests
Open a new tab in Chrome and paste the following in the URL bar;
chrome://settings/content/notifications
This will take you to the notifications settings for Chrome. At the top, you will see a switch called ‘Ask before sending (Recommended)’. Turn it off and it will block all notification requests.
This does have a downside; the web apps/services that you do want to see notifications from will not be able to prompt you for permission.
Turning this switch off won’t prevent websites that are allowed to send you notifications from sending them. This also means that you can selectively enable notifications for websites.
To enable notifications for a website, visit it and click the padlock icon in the URL bar. From the menu that opens, click ‘Site Settings’. This will open another Chrome internal page dedicated to that website and its settings. Open the Notifications dropdown and select the ‘Allow’ option.
That will do the trick. The website will be able to send you notifications but other websites, those that you haven’t given the same permission to, will not be able to ask you to allow notifications.
We should mention that some websites might still show you notification requests. These ‘requests’ aren’t the same ones that you’ve disabled. Some websites use popups to ask for permission to show alerts. These popups are like any other popup a website might show you and Chrome’s notifications have nothing to do with. There isn’t any way to natively disable them. You can probably use a sophisticated content blocker to stop it but it may not work.
If you allow websites like that to send you notifications, they will very likely send them via Chrome’s notifications which are routed through your native notifications. The persistent popup is there so that the website can prompt you for permission to send notifications every single time you visit it. It doesn’t want to take No for an answer and it’s spamming you this way. If you ever wonder why a website keeps asking to show notifications even though you’ve told it not to, this is why.
