Today on the Chromium blog, Google has announced that it will be decommissioning the Chrome Notification Center in an upcoming release of the browser. If you aren’t sure what the Chrome Notification Center is exactly, don’t feel bad. According to the post, it was used by very few people which is exactly why it is going away. Essentially it was a notification tool that sat in the System Tray of your Windows PC, Mac or Linux device that gave you notifications like weather updates, sports scores, etc. It was tied very closely to the information that you have identified in Google Now for content to show you. The Chrome Notification Center was launched back in 2013 but usage of it has simply not been there for Chrome to continue to support it.
In the post, Software Engineer Justin DeWitt writes “To keep Chrome simple, it will be removed from Windows, Mac, and Linux in the upcoming release. The notification center on Chrome OS
Chrome OS
will remain unchanged.”
That last point is critical. If you are using Chrome OS, there won’t be any change. You will still have the Chrome Notification Center on that platform as it is essentially the only notification area for them. For those of you who use it on your other devices however (Clinton raises his hand) it will be going away soon.
The post goes on to say that web pushes are continue to grow and that is where users engage with the sites they care about most.
With the growth of web push, notifications are an increasingly important way for users to engage with web pages they care about. By streamlining the experience on desktop, Chrome can ensure a simple notification experience on every platform.
Interestingly Chrome does not support the built-in notification centers of Windows 10 and Mac OS X today but with this change, that attitude could be changing for Google. Time will tell.
As for me, I personally will miss the Chrome Notification Center. I use it daily on my Windows PC but I get the feeling that I’m one of very few who do use it.
