Firefox has officially introduced an anticipated feature to silence those annoying-as-hell website notifications that assault you while you’re browsing the web.
Firefox-maker Mozilla announced in November that the feature was forthcoming and implemented some changes in Firefox 70 to help mitigate the deluge of website prompts by changing the “Not Now” response to those notifications to “Never.” With the rollout of Firefox 72 today, the browser makes it official. Now, the browser has swapped out those maligned pop-up windows with a speech bubble in the URL bar.
Here’s how to use the new tool: If you, a maniac, wish to enable notifications from a website, you can do so by clicking on the icon and selecting “Allow Notifications.” If you, a reasonable person, wish to never see it or notifications again, you can click on the icon and select “Never Allow.” If for whatever reason you change your mind about your website notification settings, you can change them by visiting your Firefox Preferences, selecting Privacy and Security, clicking Permissions, and selecting Settings from Notifications.
In a blog post about the update this week, Mozilla noted that some sites may prompt users if they’ve interacted with the page. Mozilla said that users can disable these prompts from appearing in the future by checking the “Block new requests” box from that page’s settings in Notifications.
Many of us can surely agree that incessant pop-up requests from nearly every site you visit are a minor albeit nagging annoyance. But Mozilla did some research and has the numbers to back that up. According to data Mozilla shared last year, roughly 99 per cent of those stupid prompts go unaccepted while 48 per cent are straight-up denied. In fact, Mozilla found that during just a one-month window during the Firefox 63 release, only 23.66 million requests from websites were accepted out of a total 1.45 billion shown to users—less than 2 per cent.
In other words, the pop-ups are almost universally detested. Feel no remorse in banishing them forever.