Mozilla will fight obsessive site notifications in Firefox

Mozilla has announced plans to combat spam requests for showing notifications in Firefox. In 2019, the organization also plans to work on internal pop-up requests in Firefox

Most modern browsers support push notifications. This type of alert is used by sites to inform users about new publications and updates. Users must accept the request to display notifications so that they appear later.

In theory, everything sounds good, but in reality, many sites ignore push-notifications and regularly show requests for their display, often even on the first visit.

Firefox 59 introduces the function of blocking all requests for displaying notifications and selectively showing them. Similar functionality appeared in Chrome in 2016.

Mozilla statistics show that most users reject requests to display notifications. For example, between December 25, 2018 and January 24, 2019, Firefox Beta users were shown 18 million requests. Only 3% were accepted, and 19% of them caused an immediate cessation of site visits.

The organization notes that many sites show requests too early and are not interested in improving the user experience.