With the Firefox changing the way it handles the notification, we can say goodbye to those annoying pop-ups forever. They have conducted experiments with the user’s action toward various notifications in many different angels and have finally managed to come up with a solution. Mozilla announced that they will be releasing Firefox 72 with the new special way of silencing these pop-ups. The most important point is that it requires user interaction to make that happen.
When the users were tested around, they found that the notifications and prompts that appear multiple times are quite unpopular with the users. “On Release, about 99% of notification prompts go unaccepted, with 48% being actively denied by the user,” as was analyzed by Mozilla in their blog post.
Although webmasters use notification mostly of the pop-up nature so that they can enhance user experience and reduce bounce rate in their sites, but these notifications can get really irritating as they keep on disturbing us.
Furthermore, some attackers also utilize these prompts to trick the users to download the malware as reported by ZDNet.
With the release of Firefox 70 last month, they have already replaced the “Not Now” in the notification with the option “Never”, really stepping up with their plans of restricting the annoying browser prompts.
Now as they release Firefox 72 in January, the Firefox users will have a whole lot more peace as they browse through ‘n’ number of websites smoothly. This version will seek user interaction with all the notification permission prompts. Moreover, this is only one-time action and next time whenever the user wishes to visit that site, and they don’t fear the popping up of that earlier pop-up. In addition, if they ever feel like opening that notification again, they can find the small icon that is placed in the URL bar.
However, Mozilla which became the first browser to come up with this feature isn’t the only one who has been experimenting around on restricting the pop-ups. The search engine company Google has also been delving into this issue for quite some time as was pointed out by Chrome engineer Alex Russell in his series of tweets where he mentioned that Chrome might deal with the pop-up notification in the near future.
Mozilla and Google have decided to support encrypted DNS in their browsers to increase the privacy of the users. However, the opposing party consists of many broadband industry stakeholders rejecting this move and stating that it could interfere on the mass scale. But Mozilla requested the congress to ignore the on-going protests by the ISP’s and other parties who sent the letter to block the name.
“Unsurprisingly, our work on DoH has prompted a campaign to forestall these privacy and security protections, as demonstrated by the recent letter to Congress from major telecommunications associations. That letter contained a number of factual inaccuracies,” Mozilla Senior Director of Trust and Security Marshall Erwin wrote in the letter sent to chairs and ranking members of three House of Representatives committees, as quoted by Ars Technica.
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