Dumb Question Corner – How to Stop Safari from Offering Push Notifications

David Bogdan sent in our Dumb Question for this week. He wrote:

Hello Bart and Allison,
Hello from Japan. It’s been awhile, though I’ve been listening to you on podcasts and it sounds like the two of you are doing well.

I wanted to ask another dumb question regarding security. Recently, I’ve been getting occasional popups such as the one below which ask me whether I want push notifications sent to me from the website.

The popup is incredibly intrusive and worries me. You can’t close the tab or quit Safari. You have to either click on the button or resort to force quitting.

Clicking on the one of the buttons would no doubt be the easiest route, but it seems someone could easily use javascript to produce a similarly appearing popup, and I prefer not to click on things I don’t know about. I’d prefer to show the better part of valor and just close the tab, but this new feature of Safari doesn’t seem to allow that. Is there any way to disable this Push popup in Safari?

Bart says these aren’t typical popups, which are really websites sending you somewhere else. This is Safari asking permission to send you notification (it’s a feature!) not a true popup. The good news is that we found the checkbox in Safari that stops this behavior. In Safari Preferences, Notifications tab, at the bottom uncheck the box that says “Allow websites to ask for permission to send push notifications”.

And of course I created a step by step tutorial using Clarify on how to get Safari to quit annoying you!