Microsoft will roll out new adaptive notification requests feature on Microsoft Edge

Microsoft is rolling out a new adaptive notification requests feature for Microsoft Edge.

With the new feature, Microsoft will show or hide notification requests based on what users like.

The tech giant had introduced quiet notification requests in Microsoft Edge 84, “which reduced the prominence of notification requests while keeping them at a noticeable location in the UI.”

With the new feature, it is “crowdsourcing” to provide either the full prompt or quiet requests for notifications based on the data accrued from actual user choices.

“We want to maximize the value of notifications and minimize their annoyance by quieting notification requests in the latter case, without penalising sites offering valuable notifications,” Microsoft explained in a blog post.

“We suggest site owners provide permission requests with consideration to the user’s context and timing, after users have engaged with sites. Sites that follow good practices and earn a high user acceptance rate will begin to show the full prompt without being ‘quieted’,” it said.

To do this, the tech giant has introduced a score system. Whenever a notification prompt pops up on a user device, the user can choose to either block, allow, ignore or dismiss the prompt.

“As our 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,” the tech giant explained.

“Based on the collective score of users, we provide quiet requests to the websites whose scores are higher than the threshold,” it added. It will use updated data regularly so sites can provide the full prompt to their users when they get better acceptance rates from their users, it said.

With the new feature rollout, the “Quiet notification requests” setting in the Microsoft Edge settings page will be disabled by default. “However, users can always opt into quiet notification requests by enabling this setting if you prefer the quiet requests,” Microsoft said.

“If you have used Microsoft Edge and have changed this setting manually at least once, the value will stay as you set. In that case, please disable the setting to get the adaptive notification requests behaviour,” it said.

Apart from this, it will also enable quiet requests when users explicitly block requests three consecutive times while navigating across different websites.

It had experimented with the new adaptive notifications requests feature in Canary, Dev, and Beta channels. It has now rolled out this new experience to all users in Microsoft Edge 88 Stable.

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