Today, Microsoft announced a change that it"s making to its Edge browser that should make notification requests a lot less annoying. The change that will make them less annoying is, well, that they"re just not going to happen anymore. By default, notifications will be turned off until you turn them on, and this is live with Edge 84.
Instead, you"ll see the notification bell in the address bar with a red mark on it that indicates that notifications are blocked by default. If you click on it, you can opt into receiving notifications from that site.
This setting is on by default now and can be turned off under "Quiet notification requests" in Settings. The company says that it"s listening to feedback, as always, and it"s working to improve the feature. For example, there might be sites that you do want to get notification requests from, so it might start building its own, proprietary white list of websites that can annoy you with notification requests. It would be sites that Microsoft deems valuable based on its telemetry data.
Surely, the feature will need to be refined over a few iterations, but it will be welcomed by many. Notification requests can be quite intrusive, especially from sites that can already be intrusive with ads and such.