How to Enable or Disable Push Notifications in Chrome?

Website owners follow different types of promotional strategies to distribute their content to readers. Email subscription, feed subscription, newsletter are some of the popular ways. There is also another promotional method, website or push notifications, possible with the latest browsers like Chrome. In this article let us discuss what exactly is the push notifications, how it works and how to enable or disable push notifications in Chrome browser.

What is Push Notifications?

Viewing notifications are common on mobile applications like WhatsApp and desktop applications like Outlook. But there is a major difference on how these notifications are generated. You might have noticed that some applications trigger notifications only when it is open or runs in a background. While some applications, especially on mobiles, send notifications even when the application it is not running. So there are two types of notifications – one is triggered locally when the application is open and the other is triggered by a web server regardless of the application is running or not.

The second type of notification that are pushed from a web server to users are called push notifications. When you browser internet, you might have seen that may sites ask you to allow notifications like below.

This is a website or push notification. Push notifications are the popup notifications sent by the websites every time whenever the site owners publishes new content. It helps to provide you the timely updates so that you don’t miss any content from their site. This way user gets the content on time without every time exclusively checking the website for the new content.

Push notifications helps both site owners and interested users. The site owners use this technique to make their users stick to their site. This can be very helpful for the users in order to get updates on some flash sale or some event they would like to see on the website.

How Push Notifications Work?

Push notifications are made with the help of two technologies – ‘Push technology’ and ‘Notification technology’. Complimentary they use two APIs: ‘Push’ and ‘Notification’. Push API is started when a specific server transfers an information to a service provider. Notification API is started when a service provider is showing some information to the user. The entire process works as below:

• Website sends local JavaScript notification asking users to subscribe to push notification.
• When a user allows the push notification, Chrome stores this information in the user profile settings. Website also sends this information to the server and saves the subscription status.
• Whenever new content is available, the web server sends API call to the subscribed users and show pushes the notification.
• Browsers like Chrome uses ‘Service Worker’ JavaScript and sends the push event in the frontend.
• User can see the notifications in different styles depending upon the operating system.

Google Chrome offers a feature to enable or disable push notifications from the websites anytime you want.

Default Notifications Behavior in Chrome

Chrome is a sensible browser to keep the default settings in such a way asking users to decide. Whenever you open a website that tries to send push notification, Chrome will prompt you to allow or block the site from sending notifications. This is a default behavior which you can customize as per your need.

Chrome automatically saves the allowed and blocked sites list in the settings page. you can change this preference any point of time later.

Enabling Push Notifications in Chrome

Enabling the push notifications is easy and there are many ways to do it. When a website is asking for permission to send push notifications, you will see two options – block or allow. Click on the ‘Allow’ option to enable notification for that specific site. When you want add a site manually, you need to go inside Chrome settings page and for doing this, follow the steps given below:

Open Chrome and go the command URL ‘chrome://settings/content’. Now, you need to find the ‘Content setting’. You can find it under ‘Privacy and security’ section. This is the place where you allow websites, “what to use and what not to use”. You can control various information and permissions from here.

Click on it and open them. You see a lot of options in there. Now, you need to find the ‘Notifications’ options. Click and open it.

You’ll see the first option as ‘Ask before sending (recommended)’. As explained above, this is the default behavior of Chrome to ask permission before allowing a site to send notifications. Make sure, you’ve turn it on for the notifications to work. Under that option, you will see two sections: “Block” and “Allow”.

Now, for enabling ‘push notifications’ alert in Chrome, you need to add a site here. Click on Add button which is in front of the ‘Allow’ section.

It will ask you to add a website, type a website URL and add it. Henceforth, you will receive all notifications send from the website on Chrome.

Now, one thing to remember that ‘push notifications’ is sort of a service which not every website owner provides. So, before adding a website in the previous option, you need to check whether the site is providing the ‘push notifications’ service or not.

Disabling ‘Push Notifications’ in Chrome

This option comes up when you don’t want these notifications from the website. Sites updates so many times in a day and sometimes, these notifications can be annoying. In order to disable them, the process is same as enabling the notifications. You can click on ‘Block’ option when the site is asking for permission. If you want to do it from settings page, go to the ‘Notifications’ section as explained above.

Now you need to go to the ‘Block’ section where you can block the site from sending you notifications.

Click on ‘Add’ button in front of the block section. Now, enter a site URL and click on ‘Add’ button. The blocked sites will no longer be able to send you notifications.

If you want to completely disable notifications on Chrome for all sites, simply disable the option ‘Ask before sending (recommended)’.

Controlling Notifications from Address Bar

There is also another trick to control notifications from specific website. Open a site in Chrome and click on the padlock saying secure (old websites with HTTP protocol may say Not Secure). Click on the “Site settings” option from the dropdown.

Choose ‘Allow’ or ‘Block’ from the dropdown against ‘Notifications’ option.

Push Notifications on Mobile

Apple does not support ‘Service Worker’ JavaScript for third party applications. Hence Chrome also does not offer any push notification service in macOS. Remember, the push notification will work on Safari and native macOS and iOS apps as a builtin feature.

On Android, you can enable or disable notifications by navigating to “Tap on three dots > Settings > Site Settings > Notifications”. For managing specific websites, open the site in Chrome and go to “Tap on three dots > Info > Site Settings > Notifications”. Here you can ‘Allow’ or ‘Block’ the site for sending notifications. If you didn’t see the settings option then the site is not offering push notification services.

Viewing Push Notifications

• The push notification messages will be displayed as a notification banner in Windows.
• On Mac, you will see native alert style Mac notifications when the site sends push notification. You can view them in ‘Notification Center’ and simply click on it to directly navigate to the webpage and read content.
• All push notifications will be disbaled in incognito mode.
• Chrome does not send push notifications in iOS devices as Apple doesn’t support this function.
• The push notification service must be enabled at the server of the website so that the users can subscribe. You can’t receive notifications on sites that don’t have push notifications enabled on the server.
• You should have enabled JavaScript on Chrome for the push notifications to work.

Conclusion

In above guide, we have learned about what is push notification and how we can enable and disable push notification is Chrome. You can enable or disable notifications for all sites or for a specific site as per your need. While adding a site, make sure that site provides you with this sort of service. You can add or delete sites any point of time from the notification panel easily.