
Chromium Blog: Streamlining Notifications on Desktop - PankajGhosh
http://blog.chromium.org/2015/10/streamlining-notifications-on-desktop.html
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lewisl9029
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.

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sahaskatta
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.

~~~
Touche
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
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.

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pgrote
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
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?

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tlrobinson
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.

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jreed91
So where will Google Now Cards go?

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egeozcan
It was quite handy, what would be the replacement?

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runn1ng
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
It's a bell-shaped icon in the task bar, which also now includes Google Now
style cards.

~~~
runn1ng
Oh. I have Ubuntu Linux, and I don't see any icon like that anywhere.

~~~
notnarb
Works fine for me in Ubuntu 14.04 with Unity as my Desktop environment and
using the latest packaged version of Chromium.

It only comes up if you receive a notification from a website:
[http://imgur.com/lGOJrHb](http://imgur.com/lGOJrHb)

You can then click 'Chromium - Notifications' to get what I believe to be the
'notification center': [http://imgur.com/JyIVNvG](http://imgur.com/JyIVNvG)

you can try it out if you open the chromium console (f12), and enter
"setTimeout(() => new Notification("Insert text here"), 2000)" and alt-tab to
something that isn't chromium.

Neat feature, but hard to expect users to figure it out on their own.

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sjun
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.

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mynameisvlad
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
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.

