Reducing Permission Fatigue is an Ongoing Effort
One of the reasons I'm happy using Firefox and working for Mozilla is our commitment to improving the user-experience of the web, with an eye toward improving safety, privacy and trust.
Permission fatigue is one of those problems that needs serious thought, especially as we move off the desktop, into a world of AR, VR, wearables, "Smart" Speakers, "Smart" Homes, connected cars, and on and on. The more we burden user's with permission requests, the more they will ignore them, click through quickly, or leave the web for native apps that don't burden them with such requests (likely at the expense of their long term privacy and agency).
The latest experiment in Firefox Nightly is aimed reducing the annoyance of one recent plague of permission requests, the "Notification Permission".
Permission prompts are a common sight on the web today. They allow websites to prompt for access to powerful features when needed, giving users granular and contextual choice about what to allow. The permission model has allowed browsers to ship features that would have presented risks to privacy and security otherwise.
However, over the last few years the ecosystem has seen a rise in unsolicited, out-of-context permission prompts being put in front of users, particularly ones that ask for permission to send push notifications.
In the interest of protecting our users and the web platform from this, we plan to experiment with restricting how and when websites can ask for notification permissions.
Check it out. And try out Nightly!