Websites wanting to send notifications – please stop!
When going to websites in olden times, you always had to click to shut down adverts that kept popping up trying to trick you by hiding the x button or moving it. Happily, thanks to ad-blockers, this is no longer such a problem. It is also why I no longer make any money with this website, but that is another issue. However, this has now been replaced with –
‘This website wants to: show notifications’ and you then have to click ‘allow’ or ‘block’. It’s annoying. Especially if you browse the web when drinking and agree to anything. If you have a website and happen to be reading this then please pissing well stop. And it is not just this, there is the notification (possibly due to some kind of regulatory ruling) that lets you know that the website keeps cookies and blocks a section of the screen until you clear it.
This has been going on for a while but I seem to be noticing it more recently and it is seriously ruining my new zen state thanks to stoic philosophy that I wrote about recently. I know this is essentially a whine disguised as a blog post on technology but I like to think of it as informative, letting websites know about things that annoy people. I am obviously mostly calm and reasoned about all other things.
I guess my aim is to hope for a better internet for all without being hassled in some way. If websites had a button that said: ‘click here to receive notifications’ and that was all, then that would be great. The interweb would be generally vastly improved if the minor annoyances could one day be finally removed. Like I said, it used to be pop-up ads or before that websites constantly trying to change your homepage to theirs. Now the irksome things are downloading a new app and being forced to agree to reveal all your friends contacts and their birthdays just to play a game, or things generally popping up in the middle of the screen when you just want to read a fascinating article on how you have been – drinking water / going to the toilet / eating apples or bananas – incorrectly your whole life. (Those are all true things.)
There are ways to get rid of this, it just isn’t the default. If, like me, you use multiple browsers, you have to change the setting in each one. But then you are done. Here is an article on how to stop websites from doing this on your device from now on. I read that piece with a sense of my calm inner zen returning. Thanks website, I was thinking, this is genuinely going to improve my- then I got to the bottom and a screen popped up, without any sense of irony, asking me to join their mailing list so I can be notified about things. So close.
Deep breaths. Be stoic.
