Google reveals how Chrome is blocking over 7 billion spam notifications a day

We’ve all at least once tapped the “Allow” button when visiting some random website, only to then get bombarded with junk alerts over the next few days. Well, Google has decided that it’s time to put an end to this.

In a fresh blog post, the company shared that Chrome cut unwanted notifications on Android by more than 7 billion a day in the first quarter of this year alone. Yes, that’s right — 7 billion. And keep in mind that the number only takes into account the Android platform.

According to Google, there is no single magic switch that does all this work. Instead, the company describes what it calls a “Swiss cheese” model of defense, in which a bunch of overlapping protections each catch different kinds of abuse, so that if something slips past one layer, another one grabs it.

That said, some of what the company highlighted isn’t exactly new. Chrome has been chipping away at this problem for a while now, and it fits alongside other recent tweaks to how the browser handles alerts, including a redesigned, less annoying notification prompt landing in Chrome 155 that no longer hijacks your whole screen the second a page loads.

Now, to get to what’s actually happening under the hood. For starters, Chrome automatically pulls notification permissions from sites you haven’t touched in a while, and from sites that keep triggering warnings for shady behavior.

It has also gotten better at spotting entire networks of websites that team up to blast people with scams and malware, and it yanks their access before the junk ever reaches you.

On top of that, Google is throttling the worst offenders at the server level through Firebase Cloud Messaging, capping disruptive domains at 1,000 messages per minute and tightening that limit further for repeat offenders.

There is a nice side benefit too, because all those background pings were quietly chewing through your battery. Google says shutting them down means less strain on your phone throughout the day.

The best part about all this is that you don’t need to fiddle with any settings by default. Though you still have manual control over which sites can bug you with notifications when you want.

Overall, it’s a nice quality-of-life improvement that was much-needed.

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