Unwanted pop-ups

A reader has an issue with what he thinks are unwanted pop-up ads. But I think they might be something else.

“Recently,  ads are popping up in my lower right screen every few moments. This seems to be relatively recent.  Some are with the Chrome emblem and others with no specific origin.  Any simple way to stop these pop-ups?  My settings in Chrome and
on Windows do not permit pop-up ads supposedly.”

I don’t think you’re dealing with pop-up ads. I think what you’re seeing are notifications from Windows, specifically, notifications from Chrome. Do they look something like this?

To find out where they are coming from, click the icon for your Windows 10 notification center.

You’ll probably see that they are coming from the Chrome browser.

Here’s how that happens. These days, when you visit many websites, you’ll be asked if you’d like to receive notifications. If you don’t decline them or accidentally click and approve them, you’ll start receiving notifications.

That’s exactly what happened on a visit I made to the website for the Albuquerque Journal a few weeks back. Here’s how to control those notifications. Open Chrome, click the three-dot menu icon at the top right and choose Settings from the drop-down menu.

When Settings opens, scroll down to Privacy and security and click on Content settings.

Once again, you’ll need to scroll down to Notifications.

The default setting is Ask before sending. 

You can block all notifications by sliding that to the Blocked position.

Or, if you’d like to continue to receive some notifications, you can scroll down to your permitted notifications and click the three-dot menu icon. Some notifications like those for Gmail and Google Drive can’t be edited.

You can choose to permanently block notifications from that site or simply remove it if there’s a chance you might want notifications from that site at another time. An example of when you might want to remove rather than block is if you want to get basketball scores during March Madness or news updates on election night but only for a short duration.