Google is making a change to how its Chrome browser pushes notifications to users. Chrome started supporting push notifications from web apps to the desktop five years ago, and a few years later, it introduced a consolidated notification center for messages from web apps and extensions. Turns out, very few people actually use the notification center, so Google is dropping it from Chrome in the next release.
“With the growth of web push, notifications are an increasingly important way for users to engage with web pages they care about,” Google software engineer Justin DeWitt writes today. “By streamlining the experience on desktop, Chrome can ensure a simple notification experience on every platform.”
It’s worth noting that ChromeOS will still feature the notification center. It’s only on Windows, Mac and Linux that Google will drop this feature.
Google has no plans to support the built-in Action Center in Windows 10 and also doesn’t push messages to Apple’s OS X Notification Center, either. Maybe today’s move means that it’ll soon add support for these native notifications channels, though.