Chrome to switch from permission infobars to bubbles

Martin Brinkmann
Feb 12, 2014
Google Chrome
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Chrome's content settings define how different types of contents are handled by the web browser. You can configure the handling of cookies and images here for example, but also for location look-ups, JavaScript,  connected microphones and cameras, or plug-ins.

Most of the time, you can either outright allow or disallow the use of a content type on the web, or add exceptions for specific sites so that their attempts are either blocked or allowed automatically.

If you have set a content setting to notify you when a site tries to use specific content types, then an infobar is displayed at the top of the browser window that informs you about it.

Here you can then accept or deny access with a click on the corresponding button.

site permission notifications chrome

You can test that yourself by opening the address http://html5demos.com/geo/ in the Chrome browser. If you have not changed the location content settings of the Chrome browser, you should get a permissions infobar at the top of the screen.

The Chromium team has been working on a different notification form for some time, and implemented it for location permission requests in Chromium and Chrome Canary.

Basically, it moves from infobar notifications to bubble notifications. Here is how the new notification type looks like when the feature is enabled.

permission bubbles chrome

As you can see, it is larger and overlays part of the website you are own. This makes it less likely to miss according to the development team.

A side effect of this is that the actual site contents are not moved down anymore when the notification message appears, and not up again once you have responded to the dialog.

The feature is not enabled by default, but can be enabled by toggling an experimental flag in the browser.

  1. Load the following address: chrome://flags/#enable-permissions-bubbles.
  2. Set it to enable.
  3. Restart the Chrome browser.

To disable it again, repeat the process but set the preference to disable instead.

Please note that this is an experimental feature right now which means that you may experience issues when you enable the feature right now.

The only issue that I ran into was that the notification bubble sometimes displayed only a deny or allow prompt without the information on top of it.

It is likely that the feature will be tested in the foreseeable future before it is added to the beta or stable builds of Google Chrome.

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Comments

  1. dzw said on February 13, 2014 at 5:27 pm
    Reply

    I wish wish wish wish there was some way of changing the background colour on those. 2 x 24 screen botH r full of browser on mostly white pages. Cue 20 minutes wondering why nothing you click on works… Really annoying

  2. YBt said on February 13, 2014 at 2:53 pm
    Reply

    Speaking of Chrome, starting with version 33, Google will block local extensions. In other words, all installed extensions not found in the Chrome Web Store will be hard-disabled. Users can still install extensions via enterprise policy or developer mode. A wave of netizen dissatisfaction with Chrome is incoming.

    1. Martin Brinkmann said on February 13, 2014 at 3:36 pm
      Reply

      Last time I read that it was limited to Stable and Beta, is that still the case?

  3. Philip J fry said on February 13, 2014 at 12:57 am
    Reply

    It’s good that they have a direction either way. Firefox sometimes pops up a yellow bar, sometimes a grey bubble, sometimes a grey bar, sometime a white bubble, sometimes a window. It depends on what it’s telling you.

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