Chromium Blog: Streamlining Notifications on Desktop

http://blog.chromium.org/2015/10/streamlining-notifications-on-desktop.html

by PankajGhosh • 11 years ago

40 21 11 years ago

blog.chromium.org

pgrote• 11 years ago

I guess I am one of the few users that appreciates the notifications. PushBullet uses the notification center to alert me of things happening on my phone.

nevi-me• 11 years ago

Me too, though because most notifications (PB, Google Now, and others) are also sent to my phone, by the time I check the Notification Center there's just the traffic and the creepy "it'll take 34 minutes to visit girlfriend" because I apparently do that most often on Tuesdays ...

The post is silent on what will happen to notifications, will they just float around and clutter the screen?

sc00ty• 11 years ago

You will still have notifications, you just won't have a notification center. Pushbullet will still alert you of things happening on your phone. Plus, the Pushbullet badge in your chrome window will still tell you about unread notifications (I don't see why this would change)

runn1ng2• 11 years ago

I have no idea what "Notification Center" is and how to get there (so yeah, I never used it)-

"Chrome Notification Center" searches in Google returns basically only reposts of this news.

Zikes• 11 years ago

It's a bell-shaped icon in the task bar, which also now includes Google Now style cards.

runn1ng2• 11 years ago

Oh. I have Ubuntu Linux, and I don't see any icon like that anywhere.

jreed91• 11 years ago

So where will Google Now Cards go?

egeozcan• 11 years ago

It was quite handy, what would be the replacement?

lewisl9029• 11 years ago

So does this mean Chrome will also follow the Firefox notifications behavior whereby a notification appears for 5 seconds and then just disappears without any trace? Or will notifications continue to stay visible until manually dismissed (either by the user or by the app)?

Without some kind of notification center, either approach would make for a rather poor experience for users in my opinion. The former means users coming back from idling will have no indication whatsoever that they have new notifications waiting to be read, and the latter means notifications could quickly clutter up the screen and users will need to manually dismiss each and every notification that appears (how would users be able to easily dismiss multiple notifications without some kind of notification center?).

Perhaps browsers could delegate to native notification APIs in OSes that offer them instead of building out their own implementations? This is what Chrome for Android does for web notifications and it works quite well in my experience.

sahaskatta2• 11 years ago

I hope they integrate with the native Notification Center on OS X and the "Action Center" on Windows 10. This would make it more consistent with how Chrome works with the native notification lists in Android and iOS.

kitsunesoba• 11 years ago

I’ve chosen to not use Chrome as my primary browser for several reasons, one of which is because it disregards native OS notifications in favor of its own, often to detrimental effect. On OS X, they’re an eyesore — they're unnecessarily large and visually incongruent with the rest of the OS, and they sit beneath native notifications rendering them useless if Chrome isn’t the only application firing off notifications.

Per-application custom notifications made sense when there was no standardized system to use, but these days they’re entirely unnecessary.

MikusR• 11 years ago

Google announced that it has no plans to integrate into Windows 10 Action Center.

sahaskatta2• 11 years ago

Any more details on that? I wonder what's the reason? It's a better experience for me to have every app take advantage of a single notification center.

Sidnicious• 11 years ago

And I hope they ditch their odd-feeling custom notifications and use native (at least on OS X) notifications instead.

Touche• 11 years ago

OSX Notification Center: where notifications go to die. Hope you were at your computer when the toast message appears otherwise you'll never know there was a notification unless you obsessively open the sidebar to check.

russjr08• 11 years ago

OS X does show the notifications on the lockscreen by default though, right? Usually when I come back to my computer I see all of the stuff I missed.

I suppose there's a short time between when you walk away and the computer locking the screen though, where the notification could be missed.

However, I feel like I've missed way more Chrome notifications because I hardly ever open the notifications menu.

sjun• 11 years ago

This decision makes sense. I'm assuming that they're going with the platform native notification APIs now.

With the release of Windows 10, all three platforms (Windows, Mac, and Linux) now have a native notification center that supports persistent notifications that were missed or haven't been dismissed.

The Chrome's notification center was always out of place for Linux and Mac users since there was already a fully featured native notification center that wasn't being used.

mynameisvlad• 11 years ago

I mean, Linux doesn't have a common native notification center. You have to install libnotify and have a notification server to use it. Granted, most distros will do it for you, but it's not really the same as OSX/Windows.

baghira• 11 years ago

By the same token it doesn't even have a window system, I don't think it is a good argument. Chrome/chromium should simply depend on libnotify, just like it depends on gtk2.

tlrobinson• 11 years ago

Good riddance.

Chrome's introduction of notification center was incredibly obnoxious. No application (especially an auto-updating one) should put an icon in my menu bar without my permission, or at a minimum without a super easy and obvious way to remove it (preferably command-drag to reorder or remove it like native menu bar icons on OS X).

Initially you had to dig into chrome://flags to disable it, then enough people complained they added a menu item to disable it.

Really they should have just integrated with whatever native notification system exists on each platform.

Chromium Blog: Streamlining Notifications on Desktop

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