How to stop those annoying website notification prompts

No, I don’t want your website to notify me — and I don’t want you to ever ask again

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Browsing the web on a desktop computer can sometimes feel like a carefully crafted test of your sanity. You’ve got ads and auto-playing videos popping up left and right, and you’ve even got pop-ups from sites asking you for permission to send more pop-ups in the form of notifications. It’s enough to make anyone crazy.

I don’t know about you, but I almost never want a website to send me notifications — not while I’m actively looking at the site and certainly not while it’s closed. Thankfully, a minute or two of simple tweaking can stop your browser from ever allowing such invasive invitations to pester you again.

We’ve included instructions for Chrome, Firefox, and Safari. Just follow the steps below. Your sanity will thank you.

Stop notifications in Chrome

• Click the three-dot menu icon in the browser’s upper-right corner and select “Settings.”
• Scroll down to the bottom of the screen, click “Advanced,” then click the “Site Settings” option under the “Privacy and security” header.
• Click “Notifications” on the screen that appears next.
• Click the toggle next to “Ask before sending (recommended).” That’ll cause the toggle to turn from blue to gray and the text to change to “Blocked.”

If you want to allow only a small number of specific sites to send you notifications — sites like Twitter and Gmail, for instance — you can add them as whitelisted exceptions on that same Chrome settings page:

• Click the “Add” button next to the word “Allow.”
• Type in the URL of the site you want to whitelist using the following format: twitter.com/* — or, for another example: mail.google.com/mail*

The asterisks serve as wildcards and tell Chrome to allow notifications from any site starting with the path you entered.