Mozilla is performing a study on how to reduce the increasing usage of displaying web site browser subscription prompts that users find annoying and are abused to send browser notification spam appearing on a user's desktop.

Browser notifications allow web sites to push notifications to users when they create new content. These content notifications are a useful way to increase traffic as they appear on a user's desktop, even if the user is not currently visiting the associated site.

In order to deliver notifications, sites will cause the browser to display a prompt asking visitors if they wish to subscribe to a site's content.

Example Firefox Notification Subscription Prompt

While browser notifications are used by legitimate sites to push content to subscribers, BleepingComputer has been tracking their increased abuse over the past year as a way to send spam directly to a user's desktop.

Browser notifications abused by scammers

Scammers abuse this feature by creating misleading sites whose main goal is trick users into subscribing to browser notifications. For example, a site may show a broken video player and then state that to watch the video a user much click the allow button as shown below.

Other examples BleepingComputer has seen include sites that state you can stream movies and TV shows, but that you need to click on the Allow button in the "Show notifications" dialog in order to enable the feature.

In reality, none of these sites actually offer the services they are promoting, but are instead using these notifications to send you an endless barrage of notification spam that promotes unwanted software, adware, payday loan scams, and adult sites.

Even worse, many users do not even know how these push notifications are appearing or how to remove the browser subscriptions.

Mozilla aiming to reduce notification subscription prompts

In a previous study, Mozilla found that in a single month over 18 million browser notification subscription prompts were displayed, but only 3% of these prompts were accepted by users. Even worse for legitimate sites that use them, almost 19% of visitors who were shown these prompts decided to leave the site rather than continue to use it.

In comparison the prompts to allow a site to utilize a connected camera or microphone are accepted almost 85% of the time.

This has led Mozilla to believe that notifications prompts are being abused by sites or being shown too early without giving users enough time to decide if they want them.

To study this, Mozilla is performing a test regarding notifications in the current Firefox 68 Nightly builds between April 1st and April 29th.

For the first two weeks, no notification prompts will be displayed on a web site to measure web site usage. In the last two weeks, Firefox will display a animated prompt to indicate that the site wants to display a notification subscription prompt.

This prompt, though, will not be shown unless a user clicks on the notification prompt as demonstrated in the image below.

Example of animated notification prompt

As a second part of the experiment, Mozilla will also be launching a short study in the stable Firefox 67 release that monitors how users interact with notifications and the sites that they are displayed on.

The results of these experiments will ultimately determine how Firefox, and potentially other browsers, allow notification prompts to be displayed to visitors