Microsoft Edge will hide website notifications based on user choices

The Edge browser gets a modified system for dealing with the notification pop-up requests that can appear when visiting websites. An earlier system hid too many, so Microsoft will now base itself on the choices that users make.

This new system, which according to Microsoft should lead to a better balance, is called adaptive notification requests. This is already being experimented with in Edge 88, among others. It is based on crowdsourcing. The choices users make when seeing the notifications are the basis for whether the system shows the full popup or mutes it.

It works through a scoring system. When a pop-up appears asking a user to show notifications, there are four options: allow, block, click away or ignore. Microsoft determines the level of irritation with these types of pop-ups based on these choices. For example, blocking is a clearer negative signal than ignoring or clicking away.

If a site’s collective score is too far in the negative, the notifications will be hidden. If the acceptance score goes in the right direction, the full pop-up can be shown to users again. According to Microsoft, this is a strong motivator for websites to behave as well as possible and only ask to show notifications when it seems that users actually want to accept them.

In July last year, the silent notification requests were first implemented in Microsoft Edge 84. This made the notification requests a lot less prominent, while they were still findable in the user interface. According to Microsoft, this worked well, but there were also complaints from users who no longer get the notifications on their favorite sites. To achieve a better balance here, the new adaptive system has been set up. Not displaying the notifications at all, in the form of the quiet notification requests setting, is also still possible, although it is disabled by default when adaptive notification requests is used.