Push notifications are one of the quieter but significant revolutions of the smartphone years - the constant pinging of information that we theoretically need to or would be interested to know.
In recent years that's extended from messages to news services and, through browsers like Chrome, any website that wants to send them, so long as you've given permission for them to do so.
Google, though, has taken note of complaints about less reputable sites taking advantage of the feature to spam people with notifcations in an attempt to gain traffic, and is seemingly adding a small feature to Chrome's backend to let users limit the time-span of their subscriptions.
The flag, #Push-Subscription-With-Expiration-Time, is set to go live in Chrome Canary, Google's less-tested, almost beta version of Chrome soon, and if it's successful there will hopefully go more widely live in time.
It seems like a net win if it works - being able to subscribe to a site's notifications for a limited time could be perfect if you're actually just following one big ongoing news story, for example, and don't want a lifetime of notifications for the sake of a few updates.
Cookies begone
Meanwhile, Google's also seemingly gearing up to change how tracking works on its browser by eliminating third-party cookies, replacing them with a "trust tokens" system which would involve less user data being harvested when you visit a site that has embedded ads.
The sysem is in its infancy, but is one part of an apparent long-term drive by Google to make the ads it places around the web more understandable and transparent on the methodology side of things.
The trust tokens system is now in testing with developers, although quite how far from being a live feature that puts it is still anyone's guess at this stage.