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?
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?