Google is now cracking down on websites that abuse Chrome’s push notifications system. Google has implemented a new feature in Chrome 86 which will safeguard users against websites that send harmful content via notifications.
Google Chrome cracks down on abusive notifications
This feature will prevent websites from sending links to phishing webpages via notifications. What’s more, websites will no longer be able to push notification with a link to malware.
Chrome will identify if the content of the notification looks spammy or suspicious. If detected on an origin, Chrome will warn users against subscribing to notifications on websites that have a tendency of sending abusive notifications.
“Although notifications on the web are useful for a variety of applications, they can also be misused for phishing, malware or fake messages that imitate system notifications for the purpose of generating user interactions,” said PJ McLachlan, Product Manager of Google Chrome.
Google Chrome will warn users by displaying permission requests using a quieter UI with the following message:
“Notifications blocked. This site may be trying to trick you into allowing intrusive notifications.”
Chrome simply discourages users from allowing notifications from websites abusing push notifications.
Although the UI matches the one that was previously announced with one major exception: Chrome will block notification permission requests when sites exhibit a pattern of sending abusive notification content over a period of time.
“Abusive notification prompts are one of the top user complaints we receive about Chrome. Our goal with these changes is to improve the experience for Chrome users and to reduce the incentive for abusive sites to misuse the web notifications feature,” McLachlan added.
As TheWindowsClub exclusively revealed earlier, Chrome is coming down heavily on websites abusing push notifications. Chrome is adding a new feature #Push-Subscription-With-Expiration-Time behind chrome://flags that will limit push notification subscriptions to 90 days, It will enable Push Subscriptions to support an expiration time.
Chrome wil also implement certain UI changes that will prompt users to set their push notification subscription to expire after a specific period.
