Windows 10: Introducing adaptive notification requests in Microsoft Edge

Brink · Feb 16, 2021

Users tell us that they find notification requests bothersome and distracting â except when they donât. We want sites to engage with users without annoying them, but we also donât want our users to miss reminders that may be important for them. With new changes that weâre rolling out, we are hoping to solve both problems at the same time.

What we learned from quiet notification requests

Our users told us that they were dissatisfied with how often they saw notification requests distract them from their current task. To help resolve this issue, we shipped quiet notification requests in Microsoft Edge 84, which reduced the prominence of notification requests while keeping them at a noticeable location in the UI. This experience was enabled by default on all sites to address user feedback about unwanted notifications.

After we rolled out quiet requests, we found that user reports about undesired notifications were largely mitigated. Weâre excited to see our customers are happier!

At the same time, we saw that fewer users were accepting notifications on popular websites with previously high acceptance rates, and we started to hear feedback from users that they couldnât find how to enable notifications for their favorite sites, or didnât understand why they no longer received notifications from their favorite sites.

Notifications can be a powerful tool to help users engage with sites that they want to remain connected with. We always want to be grounded in whatâs best for our customers and these conflicting signals told us that we needed to find a better balance between the full prompt and quiet requests.

Balance the full prompt and quiet requests : the wisdom of the crowd

Some sites offer valuable notifications, and have a high rate of user acceptance when they ask permission for notifications. Other sites offer less valuable (or even spam) notifications, and have a much lower rate of user acceptance when they ask permission to send notifications. We want to maximize the value of notifications and minimize their annoyance by quieting notification requests in the latter case, without penalizing sites offering valuable notifications.

To build a good balance, we have developed a new approach weâre calling adaptive notification requests, and have started experimenting with it in Microsoft Edge 88. With this new approach, we provide either the full prompt or quiet requests based on the data accrued from actual user choices â weâre crowdsourcing!

We suggest site owners provide permission requests with consideration to the userâs 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 âquieted.â

How it works

To achieve balance presenting the full prompt and quiet requests, we introduced a score system. Hereâs an example of the full prompt to understand how we use each user choice when a full prompt is provided.

Allow Click on âAllowâ button Block Click on âBlockâ button Ignore Navigate away without interaction on the full prompt or close tab itself Dismiss Close the full prompt by clicking on âxâ
As our score system represents the level of annoyance of the full prompt, âBlockâ yields a higher score indicating a strong negative signal, âIgnoreâ and âDismissâ influence the scores as a week negative signal, and âAllowâ yields the lowest score indicating a strong positive signal. Based on the collective score of users, we provide quiet requests to the websites whose scores are higher than the threshold.

Throughout our experiment, weâll continue to fine tune the most effective score threshold that addresses user feedback about the balance between easily subscribing to the desired notifications and the annoyance of unwanted notification requests.

We will use updated data regularly so sites can provide the full prompt to their users when they get better acceptance rates from their users. This should be a strong motivator for sites to follow best practices and request notifications when they think users are most likely to accept. For sites providing quiet requests, we will provide random chance of providing the full prompt so we can continue to measure whether the site should provide the full prompt with improved user experience.

Configuring quiet notifications

With this feature rollout, users will see a new âQuiet notification requestsâ setting in the Microsoft Edge settings page (Settings → Cookies and site permissions → Notifications), which is disabled by default.

With the setting disabled, adaptive notification requests automatically presents the balanced experience: presenting either the full prompt or quiet requests. However, users can always opt into quiet notification requests by enabling this setting if you prefer the quiet requests. 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 behavior.

Additionally, when users explicitly block requests 3 consecutive times while navigating across different websites, we will enable quiet requests. Because taking an action to ignore or dismiss notifications implies a negative experience, we auto-block the notification for the website if the user dismisses or ignores the requests 3 or 4 consecutive times, respectively.

A better notification experience

Following positive results from our experiment in Canary, Dev, and Beta channels, we have rolled out this new experience to all users in Microsoft Edge 88 Stable. We are keen to continue to monitor the feedback and improve the experience as needed.

With this balanced approach, we want to see users be more satisfied with their notification experience on the web. Check out the best practices section in our previous blog to see how you can improve your notification acceptance rate. As sites follow best practices, we hope to see the overall user acceptance rates improve so that over time only known spammer sites will get quiet requests and sites can continue to benefit from user engagement through notifications. We are excited to see what change this experiment is going to bring!

Other notification improvements

In addition to the notification request experience, weâre also improving notifications in general. Here are a few improvements we have shipped:

Enabled background push when the browser is not open: Beginning with Microsoft Edge 85, users can now receive push notifications even when Microsoft Edge is closed. With this change, users will never miss notifications from their favorite sites. This feature requires Windows 10 version 20H1 or above.

Addressed user feedback where Windows toasts would permanently remain on the screen: we found that many users were frustrated by âhigh priorityâ toast notifications set with the requireInteraction member, as these notifications never disappear without user interaction. Starting with Microsoft Edge 85, these notifications auto-dismiss in Windows Action Center after 25 seconds.

Improved Chromiumâs integration with the Windows Action Center by fixing unresponsive notification click bugs. Starting with Microsoft Edge 85, we fixed three bugs where clicking on notifications in Action Center failed to trigger onclickevent handlers. We fixed this issue upstream, so both Chrome and Microsoft Edge 85 and above work correctly with the notifications dismissed to Windows Action Center.

Please share your feedback

Weâd love to hear your thoughts on our approach to balance the full prompt and quiet requests. If you run into any issues or have any feedback, use the in-app feedback button (or Alt+Shift+I). You can also reach out to us on Twitter.

â Jungkee Song, Program Manager, Microsoft Edge
â Daniel Soromou, Software Engineer, Microsoft Edge
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Source: Introducing adaptive notification requests in Microsoft Edge - Microsoft Edge Blog

How to Allow or Block Web Push Notifications for Sites in Microsoft Edge

How to Turn On or Off Quiet Notification Requests for Sites in Microsoft Edge Chromium

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:)

Brink · Feb 16, 2021

New quiet notification requests in Microsoft Edge

Earlier this year, we met with users to understand how they felt about permissioned web features, such as requests to send notifications or access the camera or microphone. The individuals we spoke with made it clear they find notification requests bothersome and distracting—except when they don’t.

These users were typically bothered if they couldn’t understand the value of notifications from a given site, or if the prompt appeared immediately upon visiting the site. However, many of these same users want or even depend upon notifications from a site that’s important to them: for example, meeting alerts from a calendar web app or updates from their favorite media subscriptions.

Because we know that notifications are a key part of valuable web app scenarios, we continue to invest in a great end-to-end notification experience with open source collaboration on improved integration with the Windows 10 Action Center. As part of this investment, we recognized an opportunity to improve upon the notification request experience.

Quiet notification requests

Beginning with Microsoft Edge 84, we’re introducing support for a new notification request experience called quiet notification requests. This experience is currently enabled by default for all Microsoft Edge users, but users can turn off the “Quiet notification requests” setting at edge://settings/content/notifications if they prefer.

How to Turn On or Off Quiet Notification Requests for Sites in Microsoft Edge Chromium

With quiet requests enabled, site notification requests made via the Notifications or Push APIs will appear as a bell labeled “Notifications blocked” in the address bar, as opposed to the typical full flyout prompt.

This treatment reduces the prominence of notification requests so the user can stay focused on their current task, but keeps the request at a noticeable location in the UI. If the user wants to subscribe to notifications, they can click the “Notifications blocked” bell icon and accept the request:

Planned updates

We’ve opted to turn on this setting by default for users in Microsoft Edge 84 due to high volumes of user feedback around unwanted notification subscriptions; we hope quiet notification requests will help reduce unintentional subscriptions.

As we found in our user research, however, there are some scenarios where notification requests are particularly welcome and may warrant the full prompt. We’re currently exploring turning on the full flyout prompt when data suggests users find a given site’s notification request valuable. Users would be able to keep the quiet notification requests experience for all sites if they prefer. Stay tuned for updates!

In addition to the notification request experience, we’re also improving notification reception and interaction experience. We found that many users were frustrated by “high priority” Toast notifications set with the requireInteraction member, as these notifications never disappear without user interaction. Starting with Microsoft Edge 85, these notifications will now auto-dismiss in Windows Action Center after 25 seconds. Stay tuned to our upcoming blog for more details on this and other improvements.

Best practices: providing a great notification request experience

While web developers don’t have control over the browser UI for permission requests, carefully crafting the moment you make this request can have a positive impact on your users’ experience and engagement with your site. We’d recommend the following best practices:

Avoid prompting the user the moment they land on your site. We’ve found that some users will completely abandon a website that requests permissions up front. Instead, tie your request to some logical moment in the user journey—maybe the user would like notifications on new videos after they’ve watched several of the latest additions?

Consider using the “double request” pattern. In this pattern, web developers use site UI to first gain consent from the user, then fire a notification request via the Notifications or Push API. The least intrusive way to do this would be to add a “notifications” setting to site UI, then request permissions when that site setting is turn on. Tread carefully with “popup” UI for double requests, as these may disrupt users similarly to the flyout prompt.

Consider using site UI to communicate the value of your notifications. Some individuals may feel more comfortable signing up for notifications when they understand the content and cadence of those notifications. For example, an eCommerce site might explain that notifications will be used to communicate sales and coupons only.

Avoid designing for specific browser UI. Users’ browser configurations may have UI which differs from your expectations. For example, Microsoft Edge users may or may not have turned on quiet notification requests. It’s best if your site doesn’t depend on specific browser UI. We recommend avoiding content-blocking overlays—which may block core site functionality on the request—or popups containing screenshots of browser UI.

Please share your feedback

We’d love to hear your thoughts on quiet notification requests and permission requests in general. If you run into any issues or have any feedback, use the in-app feedback button (or Alt+Shift+I). You can also reach out to us on Twitter.

Thanks for your feedback, and please stay tuned for updates on notification request experiences!

– Melanie Richards, Program Manager, Microsoft Edge
– Lillian Kravitz, Program Manager, Microsoft Edge
– Ryan Cropp, Software Engineer, Microsoft Edge

– Jungkee Song, Program Manager, Microsoft Edge
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Source: Reducing distractions with quiet notification requests - Microsoft Edge Blog

Latest Microsoft Edge released for Windows

How to Turn On or Off Quiet Notification Requests for Sites in Microsoft Edge Chromium

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jboydgolfer · Feb 16, 2021

(SOLVED/CLOSED)looking for help with Android phone CONSTANT wireless signal notification

Yeah, thats not a solution she is interested in......I've suggested that course of action. Thanks though.

Just to clarify, I feel that there MUST be a step, or series of steps to turn off JUST the wireless notification sound. Thats what Im driving @ here.

Nikhar_K · Feb 16, 2021

Notifications for Google Calendar through edge not showing

Hi,

Thank you for writing to Microsoft Community Forums.

I appreciate the efforts taken by you in resolving this issue. I understand that you are not receiving notifications for Google Calendar.

As you have already selected the options to display notifications, I would suggest you try clearing the browser cache, cookies, and check if that makes a difference. Refer the steps mentioned in the article

Delete cookies.

If that doesn’t work, I would suggest you to try repairing Microsoft Edge and see if that helps. Refer the steps mentioned below:

Press Windows key + I, to open
Settings.

Click on Apps, and select
Apps & features on the left pane.

Scroll down, look for Microsoft Edge, and click on it.

Click on Advanced Options.

Now, click on Repair.

If repairing Microsoft Edge doesn’t help, you can try resetting Microsoft Edge. However, before resetting Microsoft Edge, we would suggest you to take a backup of the Favorites. Follow the steps to take a backup:

Open Microsoft Edge.

Click on the Ellipsis (…) on the top right corner.

Under General, click on Import or export.

Now, click on Export to file and select the location where you want to export the file.

To Import the favorites, follow the steps from
1 to 3, click on Import from file and select the location.

After exporting the favorites, follow the same steps as mentioned for repairing Microsoft Edge, just click on
Reset instead of Repair.

Note: Repairing the browser won't affect anything, but resetting will remove your history, cookies, and any settings you might have changed.

Let us know the results.

Regards,

Nikhar Khare

Microsoft Community - Moderator

Windows 10: Introducing adaptive notification requests in Microsoft Edge

Introducing adaptive notification requests in Microsoft Edge

Introducing adaptive notification requests in Microsoft Edge

Introducing adaptive notification requests in Microsoft Edge

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