Notifications in Chrome are a useful feature to keep up with updates from your favorite sites. However, we know that some notifications may be spammy or even deceptive. We’ve received reports of notifications diverting you to download suspicious software, tricking you into sharing personal information or asking you to make purchases on potentially fraudulent online store fronts.
To defend against these threats, Chrome is launching warnings of unwanted notifications on Android. This new feature uses on-device machine learning to detect and warn you about potentially deceptive or spammy notifications, giving you an extra level of control over the information displayed on your device.
↫ Hannah Buonomo and Sarah Krakowiak Criel on the Chromium Blog
So first web browser makers introduce notifications, a feature nobody asked for and everybody hates, and now they’re using “AI” to combat the spam they themselves enabled and forced onto everyone? Don’t we have a name for a business model where you purport to protect your clients from threats you yourself pose?
Turning off notifications is one of the first things I do after installing a browser. I do not ever want any website sending me a notification, nor do I want any of them to ask me for permission to do so. They’re such an obvious annoyance and massive security threat, and it’s absolutely mindboggling to me we just accept them as a feature we have to live with. I genuinely wish browsers like Firefox, which claim to protect your privacy, would just have the guts to be opinionated and rip shit features like this straight out of their browser.
Using “AI” to combat spam notifications instead of just turning notifications off is peak techbro.
Thom,
you are just raging and look bitter.
It is one thing that you don’t like AI, modern web-browser, notifications. You have all rights having your own preferences.
But a “nobody asked for and everybody hates”? So I am a nobody? Continue insulting please! Especially without any argument or justification.
Let me offer a glimpse: Notifications from a browser can be very helpful especially for INTRA net applications and customer support solutions, trading platforms etc. Anything with near time asynchronous human interaction.
Might not be your cup of tea, I get it, But denying this to just everyone because it does not fits your horizon does not make you look good.
Best and cheers!
Even if you (doubtfully) have a niche where they’re useful, it doesn’t mean notifications should be allowed by default.
If you really need them you’ll take the time to click once per application and enable them.
But the platform, be it operating system or browser, should never even ask if you want them on, just offer a way to enable them if you voluntarily go to the settings.
I just gave you examples. How many applications have you deployed in corporate environments, to doubt it? We can easily debate, why browser and/or JS when all we need was a unified application engine for remote deployment (though WebAssembly fixes most of that). But just doubting a common use case?
This can be debated (like in, I see the merit in your argument). However, will you be the support person explain 5,000 corporate end-users in a multi-language scenario, that they need to ACTIVATE notifications first to make the application work? Good luck with that.
How much did Google (Alphabet) pay you to post that Mr Wears-a-suit-in-a-tiny-news-site-profile-picture
I work for a bluechip with > 100K employees. None of our desktop web applications use notifications.
And if you need it in a corporate you enable it with AD policy, like everything else.
They are not allowed by default. Web site have to request that ability and user have to agree to grant it. There are apps that pretty much require them: WhatsApp Web would be more or less useless without them. And Firefox is already almost useless for web browsing because so many web sites don’t bother to support it… I guess it may turn itself into Lynx and just become something that some retro-computing enthusiasts use… but I’m not entirely sure who would that help.
> WhatsApp Web would be more or less useless without them.
Correct example, but in my opinion not a very good one because WhatsApp really should have its own native client on each OS and (to me) looks like an abuse of the web-application concept.
> Firefox is already almost useless for web browsing
Thank you for telling, because I had no chance to notice when running everything on FireFox/WaterFox only. Ironically I pretty much consider myself a tech enthusiast and poweruser and the only two examples of unsupported sites/apps are Teams (screensharing often does not work) and Thai Airways Captcha. But what do I know.
“> Firefox is already almost useless for web browsing
Thank you for telling,”
Yes it is news to me as well I have used it since the fork from Netscape got to be damn near two decades ago now. It works perfectly fine for the vast majority of web sites out there only a couple have messed up font rendering, Ungoogled Chromium takes care of them nicely. As the gun nuts are so fond of saying you will pry it from my cold dead hands.
i agree about opt in.
But here’s a few examples – webmail, Teams in browser. definitely not a niche thing. Other support portals where notifications about ticket chenges might be useful.
They literally gave you examples… did you not read them before responding?
I agree that Thom just sounds like an angry person lately. He should take a vacation and just leave the site sit for a while, and then come back refreshed.
“I agree that Thom just sounds like an angry person lately. He should take a vacation and just leave the site sit for a while, and then come back refreshed.”
Angry because he is expressing his thoughts on that AI garbage being shoved down everyone’s throat at every turn. Just so a bunch of slimy parasites can pump and dump yet another piece of trash with no redeeming value what so ever. There always are the same bunch that show up every time to defend that garbage behaviour of the scumbags enshitifying everything in society.
And…
They are not even sharing any information with the mothership. As far as I can tell, it will download a model on your device, and use it to sort out notificaitons.
And maybe advanced users and seasoned Android people might not need it. However I have seen many being tricked. How can a regular person distinguish between an official looking “you have got virus” or even a “discount” notification from an actually official one?
(Again there are over a billion users here)
Racketeering is the word.
Thom definitely has his opinions, that’s for sure. Whether they are good ones or not is up to you to decide.
I’ve never seen site update notifications. Sounds completely insane though. Very Google. I just use Pale Moon, and I just browse the web.
“Notification” is a misnomer, they should be called WebDaemons since by allowing notification you allow Service Workers & Push API, hence a way for the webpage to perpetually run its JS in background.
Notifications for web applications: VERY useful, whether you’re using an app on a desktop browser or using a PWA to install the webapp to your device. Webmail, feed readers, social media applications, calendars, to-do lists, control panels letting you know a long-running action has finished, all kinds of things. Remember the old days when you had to install a separate program to live in your taskbar and tell you when you had new messages in Gmail?
Notifications for general websites: A terrible idea that should never have been allowed into the wild without a little more thought.
Honestly, all they had to do was *not allow sites to prompt you*, and only allow notifications if you *actively request them*. (Yes, this has the same problem as pop-up windows, but they could use the same logic.) That would have enabled the legit uses without making it a spam vector.