I am getting an occasional pop-up window in the lower right corner of my Windows screen. This is the same place that Outlook posts email notifications, but these do not seem to map back to emails. In the linked example, I have not gotten an email from the company. Both notifications have a little right arrow that appears on mouseover, used to dismiss the window, but the email notifications don’t have a big ad on the top half. It does not look like a browser pop-up.
Where the hell is this coming from and how do I stop them?
Start by making sure any push notifications are turned off for your browser, then run an adware/malware scan and see if it turns anything up.
Actually, it looks like that’s a windows notification, not one from a browser. If you have Windows 10, click on the windows button and type ‘notifications’ and go to the notifications settings. From there you can shut them all off or pick and choose which ones you want/don’t want. I’ll bet something in that list will be related to those pop ups. If not, shut everything off except the ones you still want (ie new mail).
That appears to be a push notification from Google Chrome. My guess is that at some point you had visited the fruitmonger website noted there, and one of the first things that happened was a pop-up … er, popped up, saying “[fruitmonger.com] would like to send you push notifications – Allow?” or somedamnsuch, and you clicked the highlighted button to make that pop-up go away.
So this was coming from Chrome. I had no idea that a site could do push notifications from Chrome if the URL was not open in a tab. What a terrible feature.
I believe that’s the entire reason for push notifications. Your computer doesn’t fetch them, the server forces them to you.
What I don’t understand is why, at least until somewhat recently, you couldn’t disable them in the browser. For a while (probably until when it could be disabled) it seemed like every website I went to asked me if I wanted push notifications. You’d think that considering they have built in pop up blockers and multiple popular pop up blocker addons, Mozilla and Google would know that people are going to want to disable push notifications globally instead of site by site.
Also, the way that you can/have to go to windows to disable them just makes computers and phones seem that much more similar. Turning them off at the OS level is similar to what you would do on a phone if an app kept bugging you like that.