Chrome's Notification Center goes away but notifications will stay

Martin Brinkmann
Oct 14, 2015
Google Chrome
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Google announced today that it will remove the Notification Center that is part of Google Chrome from the browser in the upcoming release of the web browser.

One of the first things I did whenever I installed Chrome on a system was to disable notifications since I did not find them particularly useful. Quite the contrary, I found them irritating most of the time and never had any use for them on the desktop.

The same is true actually for mobile devices as well as I prefer not to receive constant streams of updates as I find the feature invasive and distracting.

The system allows websites, applications and extensions to notify you even if Chrome is minimized or not running at all.

The core idea behind it is to make you aware of new or changed content so that you can load it in the browser should the need arise.

This moves Chrome on desktop systems closer to mobile systems where apps bombard you with notifications all the time.

Google has experimented with notifications since it released early versions of Chrome and modified the feature several times in recent years. The most recent change was integrated in Chrome 42 when the company added push notifications support to the browser.

It is those that Google wants websites and apps to use in the future as the Notification Center will be removed from Chrome.

So what is changing?

chrome notifications

The notification center that you may have used in the past to look up messages will be removed. It is unclear at this point in time if Google will provide options to list previous push notifications in Chrome or if those messages are automatically removed after they have been pushed to the browser.

Sites, apps and extensions may need to modify code as old Notification Center interfaces will no longer work once the change goes live.

For users, it may mean that they won't receive notifications from some sites anymore depending on how these are implemented on the site.

Google confirmed in a blog post that several early adopters will start to offer push notifications on their sites which users can opt-in to on mobile devices. Early adopters include Product Hunt, Vice, Pinterest, Facebook and eBay.

If you have disabled notifications in Chrome, nothing will change for you at this point.

Now You: are you using Chrome's notification system on the desktop or Android?

Summary
Chrome's Notification Center goes away but notifications will stay
Article Name
Chrome's Notification Center goes away but notifications will stay
Description
Google announced today that it will retire the Chrome Notification Center on the desktop and mobile, and replace it with push notifications instead.
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Comments

  1. Trenton said on October 21, 2015 at 7:50 am
    Reply

    I can’t believe this. Google keeps releasing features, and then killing them. How do they expect anyone to ever get on board with anything new that they do. I use the notification center EVERY SINGLE DAY. My text messages get shown on MightyText and pop up in the notification center. This change in google chrome essentially kills the entire use case for me and for this app. I can’t believe this.

  2. Rob said on October 19, 2015 at 9:35 pm
    Reply

    While I appreciate the don’t turn it on, unless I want it option, I actually do find the notification center useful. I can easily check the weather and get notified when a package status has changed. I sometimes get notified on articles that relate to things I search for. All-in-all, I like it.

  3. keep said on October 14, 2015 at 9:47 pm
    Reply

    Yes i use it and I hope they keep it

  4. anon said on October 14, 2015 at 9:18 pm
    Reply

    Every major OS now has a notifications system of sorts. Isn’t this move related to that? The Chromium blog also says it’s about supporting a new web standard for notifications.

  5. Andrew said on October 14, 2015 at 8:55 pm
    Reply

    Huh, funny, I just recently disabled the notifications and “keep chrome running in background” just last night.

    The only thing I cared about in regards to that was google voice via hangouts… but I dropped hangouts completely, so didn’t make sense to have it anymore (and have chrome eat my ram when i’m not using it)

  6. not_black said on October 14, 2015 at 8:46 pm
    Reply

    What? I quite liked the Gmail pop up in the bottom right corner when I received an email.

    1. ChromeShine said on October 16, 2015 at 8:28 pm
      Reply

      Checker Plus for Gmail and Checker Plus for Calendar, comes in handy — look for extension on Google Store. I think another one is called Owl for Calendar.

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