Chrome to Automatically Remove Notifications for Unused Websites

Google announced that a coming update to Chrome will automatically remove notification permissions for sites you haven’t interacted with recently.

“Less than 1 percent of all notifications receive any interaction from users,” Chrome product manager Archit Agarwal writes. “But notifications can be genuinely valuable and helpful. Therefore, this feature will only revoke permissions for sites when there is very low user engagement and a high volume of notifications being sent. This feature does not revoke notifications for any installed web apps.”

So, this is a minor change, but a good one, and this functionality builds on the Chrome Safety Check feature, which currently disables permissions for camera, location, and more when they haven’t been used in a while as well.

Chrome will inform you when a notification is removed. And you can re-grant notification permission on a site-by-site basis in Safety Check, or by revisiting the website and enabling notifications there.

“We’ve already been testing this feature,” Agarwal adds. “Our test results show a significant reduction in notification overload with only a minimal change in total notification clicks. Our experiments also indicate that websites that send a lower volume of notifications are actually seeing an increase in clicks.”

Automatic notification permission removal will roll out soon in Chrome for desktop and Android.