Google will remove Chrome’s notification center

Yesterday, Google released the Chrome 46 update for Windows, Mac and Linux with simplified, yet improved security and some new developer features. By today, the company announced that it will remove the notification center from Chrome in following updates, while Chrome 46 still includes it. As for the reason why they are planning such a radical move that will be applied to Mac, Linux and Windows, Chrome OS keeping its notification center, was: “In practice, few users visit the notification center.”

Google has worked a lot with its notification center, ever since May 2010 when Chrome apps and extensions had added push notifications on desktop. To support Google Now for desktop, by 2013 the notification center started to appear even when Chrome was closed. Google’s intention was to keep their users informed about what apps and extensions appeared while they were away. By April this year, with the release of Chrome 42, websites received the ability to send push notifications to users throughout Chrome’s standard notification center.

Many Chrome users have found the notification system to be annoying and disabled it as soon as they’ve installed their new Chrome update. As for developers who send notification through this feature, beware of this upcoming changes. API events linked to the notification center won’t work after the new update will be released and also notifications sent only to Chrome’s notification center will give an error message. Other types of notifications will continue to function, as we are led to understand. When Chrome 47 will be released, we expect the notification center to be removed, but it might as well take effect in other upcoming updates.