This past spring, Chrome began supporting

push notifications

for web pages via the emerging

web push standard

. However, notifications in Chrome aren’t new; Chrome apps and extensions have

supported push notifications on desktop

since 2010. In some cases, these desktop notifications would appear while users were gone, so in 2013 Chrome launched the

notification center

, a place for users to find notifications from Chrome apps and extensions that they’d missed.





However, in practice, few users visit the notification center. To keep Chrome simple, it will be removed from Windows, Mac, and Linux in the upcoming release. The notification center on Chrome OS will remain unchanged.





The new

notifications documentation

reflects changes that will affect Chrome app and extension developers who send notifications to the center. Notifications sent solely to the notification center will now result in an error, and API events tied to the center will no longer fire. All other notifications will continue to work without requiring any changes.





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.





Posted by Justin DeWitt, Software Engineer