The internet has been somewhat spoiled by privacy pop-ups that ask for your permission to store cookies when you visit a website, even if you’ve looked at that site and set your permissions before.
But there’s another type of pop-up: notifications that websites can send to you directly. These are usually new articles or other content such as news. The advantage is that the notification tells you that new content has been posted without you having to visit the website to find out if there’s anything new.
As with cookies, sites can only send these messages if you allow them to. However, it is possible to confuse the popup asking if you want to be notified of new content with the privacy / cookie popup. So you might have clicked “Allow” thinking you were agreeing to a data protection pop-up or, perhaps, you knew exactly what you were doing but no longer want to get notifications from a particular website.
Although Firefox, Opera and Safari also support these so-called ‘push notifications’, most people use Google’s Chrome browser so we’ll explain how to block some or all push notifications in Chrome, on desktop and mobile.
Disable notification pop-ups on Chrome (desktop)
In the desktop version of Chrome, click the three vertical dots near the top-right corner and click on Settings.
From the left-hand menu click Privacy and security then, to the right, Site Settings.
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Scroll down and click on Notifications.
On the Notifications screen, you have three main options, as shown below: Sites can ask to send notifications, Use quieter messaging and Don’t allow sites to send notifications.
Dominik Tomaszewski / Foundry
Selecting the latter will stop all notifications in Chrome.
However, if you still want to get alerts from some websites but not others, you can do that too.
Below Default behaviour, you will see Customised behaviours.
In that section are two lists: sites that are not allowed to send you notifications and those that are.
Simply scroll down to the list of sites which are allowed and find the site you want to block. Click the three vertical dots to the right of that website and choose ‘Block’ or ‘Remove’.
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Both options will place the site in the ‘not allowed’ list, and notifications from that website will cease.
Disable notification pop-ups on Chrome (Android)
On the Android version of Chrome, the process is very similar.
Tap on the three vertical dots near the top-right corner and tap Settings.
From the menu, tap Notifications, then scroll down until you see the SITES section.
Dominik Tomaszewski / Foundry
Again, as with the desktop browser you can turn all site notifications off if you want to by tapping the ‘Show notifications’ toggle to off.
Dominik Tomaszewski / Foundry
But for individual sites, simply tap on one from the list and turn off notifications in exactly the same way by using the Show notifications toggle.
Dominik Tomaszewski / Foundry
As iOS doesn’t currently support push notifications, you won’t see them on an iPhone or iPad in Chrome.
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Author: Jim Martin, Executive Editor
Jim has been testing and reviewing products for over 20 years. His main beats include VPN services and antivirus. He also covers smart home tech, mesh Wi-Fi and electric bikes.