Microsoft Edge gets better at handling annoying website notifications

With the new 'adaptive notification requests' feature, Microsoft Edge won't show users notification requests that other people don't like.

Via a blog post published on Feb 16, Microsoft reveals a new solution to make website notifications in Edge browser less annoying. This solution is called "adaptive notification requests," which will make notifications less bothersome and distracting while still being helpful.

The company is rolling this feature out in Edge 88 after having positive results from the experiment in Canary, Dev, and Beta channels.

Microsoft Edge’s new feature will make web notifications in the browser less annoying

This new feature can be considered an improvement of the 'quiet notification requests' feature that was rolled out in Microsoft Edge 84. As per Microsoft, the 'quiet notification requests' feature was received well by users. But, there were also complaints from some Edge users that they could not find how to enable notifications on the sites they wanted to interact with. That's where the new 'adaptive notification requests' feature comes in.

How does it work?

With the latest release, Microsoft Edge is crowdsourcing data and information about how users deal with website notifications. It'll track the options users choose (allow, ignore, block, or dismiss notifications entirely), and then compile that information and data into an annoyance score. Edge will automatically quiet the notifications from websites that have too high annoyance scores. On the other hand, websites following good practices and earning a high user acceptance rate will not be "quieted" and can show full prompt.

For users who would rather stick with Microsoft Edge's quiet notification requests, it's simple to enable the feature by getting to the browser’s Settings, then selecting "Cookies and site permissions," and then "Notifications." 

About the new adaptive notification requests, this feature is rolling out to users in Microsoft Edge 88 Stable, according to Microsoft's blog post.

• See also: Bandwidth hogging: Top things eating up a lot of internet bandwidth

Sources:

blogs.windows.com/msedgedev/2021/02/16/introducing-adaptive-notification-requests-in-microsoft-edge

engadget.com/microsoft-edge-website-notifications-adaptive-151011484.html

xda-developers.com/microsoft-edge-adaptive-notifications/