Dismissing notification popups

I just recently made the switch from Unity in Ubuntu 20.04 to Gnome in 24.04. Back in Unity I’d get notification popups and be able to dismiss them just by clicking on them. Now in Gnome the popups can only be dismissed by waiting, or by clicking on a tiny X that isn’t always responsive (my computer is old), which more often than not results in an undesired switch to the app that gave the notification. Typical case is I’m doing something in a Firefox tab, I get an email notification, click to dismiss, and suddenly I’m dealing with an opened email in the webmail tab that I never intended to open. I’m training myself to now dismiss via the calendar dropdown (which is its own irritation as I’m used to clicking on the top bar to regain focus, but whatever), which generally avoids the unintentional opening issue. But if said email was a phishing attempt with auto-running scripts this could cause issues.

Would you make a setting that allows the user to personalize what clicking on a notification popup does?

Note that I still do want email notifications. I just don’t want clicking on them to change focus.

I just switched from X11 to Wayland for other performance reasons and the notifications are much more responsive. I’ve had no problem hitting the X and having it immediately close the popup without activation.

Click to close would still be a nice feature to have, but the status quo isn’t nearly so bad now. I still think it’s problematic behavior for an email notification to open the email though, as all it takes is one person miss-clicking the notification of a phishing email for bad things to happen.

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