Website notifications. Are these things new?

I hate that, but I hate even more the sites that detect when your mouse goes outside the bounds of the window and then pops up a message, usually about subscribing to their newsletter.

I hate this stuff.

I've been noticing that too.

For some reason, it's particularly strong on cooking recipe blogs and news sites for me. It's almost become instinctual to go to a site, deny the request for notifications, close the pop up asking me to subscribe to the newsletter/buy their book/whatever, pause the auto-playing video, and then maybe read the content.

I feel like this will be looked back on as the 2010's version of the late-90's "moving gifs all over the page" craze. Just ridiculous and in the way.

Shockingly Brave doesn't block those, I'm not sure why. A browser that has ad blockers and cookie blockers built in still gives those notification requests.

More browsers have implemented that, and many people just click "Yes" without reading at all.

They've been around for a few years, but were only supported in new browsers, now they reached mainstream. You should be able to block them by default in the browser settings.