If you’ve ever gotten a request from your browser to let a website know your location or send you notifications, then you’re probably as annoyed as I am about it.
I don’t want any website to be able to get its hooks into my computer to notify me when I’m not actively looking at that website.
So, I took about 15 minutes and figured out the best way to disable these notifications for all 3 major browsers (sorry, Microsoft Edge!), and decided to post them here, just in case you’re looking to turn them off too.
Chrome
The shortcut to get to notification settings for Chrome settings is to type “chrome://settings/content” (without the quotes) into the address bar at the top of the browser window.
You can also find this settings menu by clicking the top-right menu, clicking Settings → scroll down and click “Advanced”. Under “Privacy and security” click on “Site Settings”.
Find the setting for “Notifications” and click it. Once in this menu (“chrome://settings/content/notifications” for a shortcut) flip the switch at the top. This should set it from “Ask before sending” to “Blocked”.
Going back to the “Site Settings” menu, you can also turn off notifications for things like camera, location, microphone, motion sensors, and all sorts of other data that you don’t want a website to ask about or have access to.
Firefox
This setting is pretty easy to find in Firefox. Simply go to the address bar at the top of your browser, and type in “about:config” (without the quotes).
Click the blue “I accept the risk” button to see the myriad of tweakable settings that Firefox allows access to.
The easiest way to find what we’re looking for is to type “webnotifications” (no quotes, all one word) in the search bar at the top of the page.
This should return 4 results. The one we want to change is right at the top – “dom.webnotifications.enabled”. Double-click it to change the value from “true” to “false”.
Feel free to browse around to all your other setting options. Be warned, however, that you can change some things in here that can break Firefox, so don’t click on things unless you’re sure you know what they do!
Safari
Open Safari, and click on “Safari” in the top bar menu.
Click on “Preferences”. In this settings window, click on the “Websites” tab, then click on “Notifications” in the left-hand vertical menu.
From here you can either enable and disable permission alerts for specific apps, or uncheck the box at the bottom that says “Allow websites to ask for permission to send push notifications”, which will prevent apps from sending notifications and even from asking if they can.
Test it Out
You can visit https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Notifications_API/Using_the_Notifications_API to test whether notifications are working for Firefox.
Once you turn them off, you shouldn’t get any notifications when visiting this site.
Enjoy your new, notification-free browsing experience!
