Google Chrome 84 to hide abusive notifications starting July

Google will start blocking abusive sites from delivering web notifications to Chrome 84 users starting July 2020 by automatically enrolling them in the quieter notifications UI launched in January 2020.

The quieter permission UI for notifications rolled out to Chrome users with the release of Chrome 80 in February 2020 and it hides unsolicited web alerts to prevent bad user experience.

Google plans to protect Chrome users from two types of abusive alerts: permission request issues (attempting to "mislead, trick, or force users into allowing notifications") and notification issues (used for phishing, for delivering malware, and for faking chat messages, warnings, or system dialogs).

After July 14, 2020, when the stable branch of Chrome 84 will be released, the web browser will also inform users that these abusive websites may be trying to trick them, "phish for private information or promote malware."

Safety improvements and better browsing experience 

"Abusive notification prompts are one of the top user complaints we receive about Chrome," Google Web Platform PM PJ McLachlan explained.

"A large percentage of notification requests and notifications come from a small number of abusive sites. Protecting users from these sites improves user safety & privacy on the web, and makes for a better browsing experience."

While Chrome 84's abusive notification protection is designed to only trigger for new notification permission requests from abusive websites, Google is also planning to expand these protections to users who have already provided abusive sites with permissions to deliver notifications.

"Only a small fraction of websites will be affected by this change but we expect the impact on notification volumes will be significant for some users," McLachlan added.

Sites will get 30 days notice before being tagged as abusive

Site owners can see if Google has detected any abusive notification behavior on their websites via the Abusive Notifications Report in Search Console.

They will also be notified via email the first time their site will fail abusive browser alert checks, "at least 30 calendar days prior to the start of enforcement" so they can address the issues behind the status downgrade and request another review.

Site owners and registered users can go to the Search Console help center for more info on the abusive notification review process and the Abusive Notifications Report, as well as a detailed guide on fixing abusive notifications and requesting new site reviews.

This month, Google also announced the roll-out of a new Enhanced Safe Browsing feature that comes with real-time protection against known malicious sites and downloads for Chrome 83 users.

Google Chrome will also start blocking resource-heavy ads using too many system resources without the users' knowledge starting August 2020.