How To Control Website Notifications

Websites use notifications to send you alerts when there is a new post or just to get your attention when not at the site. Sites have to ask for your permission to send these notifications, but it is easy to accidentally allow them if you are not paying attention. You can turn them off by going to your browser settings. Learn how to turn website notifications off in Safari, Chrome and Firebox.



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Closed captioning for this video is available on YouTube: How To Control Website Notifications.
So you're working on your Mac. Maybe browsing the web, checking your email, or working in an app and you get a notification, like this one. It has got a website address here. It's not from an app. As a matter of fact it has a little Safari logo and it's got some information. Maybe a link to a news story or something like that. You keep getting these. Maybe you get them from the same website. Maybe you get them from multiple websites. What are these?

Well, these are website notifications. A few years ago things changed and browsers started to allow websites to send notifications like this. So while you might be used to getting apps giving your notifications, like say when rendering a video is complete of something like that, you can now get notifications from websites. Even if you're not at the website.

It's easy to turn these off. Let me show you how. In Safari you go to Safari, Preferences and under that you go to Websites. Then you click on Notifications. Then you're going to see a list of all the websites that have asked you for notifications. So that's the important part here. No website can send you a notification without first asking your permission. So we can look through here and see well there's that website that sent me that notification. Sure enough it's set to Allow. If it's set to Allow that means that at some point it asked you permission and you said yes.

Now it's very easy to do this by accident. You can change from Allow to Deny or you can Remove it. Removing it kind of sets it back to how it was before. So let's go and take a look at the test page here. This test page I've got I can have it ask for permission. This is what the permission looks like. Now you can see there's Don't Allow and Allow. Now if you're in a rush to see something. If you're in a rush to see a news article that you heard about. You want to read something. You want to get to something on a website it would be very easy to just not bother to read this. See Allow, or Don't Allow and think maybe it's just asking me, you know, if I've read the terms or something like that. Then you hit Allow and now that site is set to send you notifications. I can show you here I get a notification.

So if I go into Preferences here and I find that site again I can change it. I can Remove it. So if I remove it and say this time say Don't Allow now I won't get a notification. It won't be able to send me one. So here I'm using buttons to do it but a website would actually just be able to push these out to you say if like if a news story broke or just wanted to remind you that you haven't used the website in a long while.

So going through these from time to time to see what sites you allowed, deny, or and which sites you just want to eliminate from the list so the next time you're asked. So having it set to Deny is really important because everytime you go to the website if it's not here, if I remove this, the next time you go to that website it might just ask me for permission again. Having it in there set to Deny means that it will not ask me again. It's just set to Deny. That's how you do that in Safari and you clean up all those notifications that are coming your way.

If you're using Chrome it works in a similar way. Ask for permission looks like this. You can allow or block. If a notification comes up, this time with a Chrome icon but the same notification. You can go to Chrome, Preferences. Look for Content Settings, that's under Advanced. Then go to Content Settings and then you can go to Notifications. You can see the list here and then you can click on the right and you canst it to Block, which is the same as Deny, or Remove it from there.

Firefox, this is what it looks like here when it asks for permissions. So you can Allow them there. Notifications works the same except with the Firefox icon. If you want to then change it afterwards you can go to Firefox, Preferences. Go to Privacy and Security. Then here you can look for under Permissions, for Notifications, Settings. You can find it there. You can change it from Allow to Block or you could Remove the website. So that's how you do it in all three browsers.

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