Microsoft announces adaptive notification requests in Microsoft Edge

Last year, Microsoft introduced a new feature to protect users from annoying notifications requests from websites. When the quiet notification requests feature is activated, all website notification requests made via the Notifications or Push APIs will appear as a bell labeled “Notifications blocked” in the address bar, instead of an annoying full flyout prompt. When users wants to accept the notification request, they can click the bell icon and accept the request.

After the roll out of this feature, Microsoft saw that fewer users were accepting notifications on popular websites with previously high acceptance rates. Many users couldn’t find how to enable notifications. To solve this issue, Microsoft today announced adaptive notification requests feature in Microsoft Edge 88. With this new feature, Microsoft Edge will offer provide either the full prompt or quiet requests based on the data accrued from actual user choices.

Here’s how it works:

• To achieve balance presenting the full prompt and quiet requests, Microsoft is using a score system.
• The new score system represents the level of annoyance of the full prompt, “Block” yields a higher score indicating a strong negative signal, “Ignore” and “Dismiss” influence the scores as a week negative signal, and “Allow” yields the lowest score indicating a strong positive signal.
• Based on the collective score of users, Microsoft will provide quiet requests to the websites whose scores are higher than the threshold.
• With this feature rollout, Microsoft Edge will disable the Quiet notification requests feature by default. When users explicitly block requests 3 consecutive times while navigating across different websites, Microsoft Edge will enable quiet requests.

Source: Microsoft