After months of testing, Google has finally turned on native support for desktop notifications on Windows 10 with Chrome 68. The feature was rolled out on macOS earlier this month with Chrome 59. The notifications are sent via the Action Center, and according to Thurrott.com, allows users to apply Windows 10’s custom notification settings to the browser.
“Users can also choose to limit the number of notifications that are displayed, as well as their priority in the Action Center. And secondly, you can avoid getting distracted when you are in Windows 10’s Focus Assist (Quiet Hours) mode”
It is worth noting here that the feature is being rolled out slowly as we speak, and according to Google’s Peter Beverloo (@beverloo), is available for around 50 percent of all Chrome 68 users on Windows 10. It is expected to be eventually rolled out to all such users over the coming days. Users not willing to wait should be able to enable the feature manually through ‘chrome://flags > Native Notifications’.
With Firefox yet to introduce native notifications in Windows 10, Chrome has now become the first major browser apart from Microsoft’s own Edge to add support for the new feature. The browser also (briefly) had unofficial support for Windows Timeline through an extension that has since been taken down because of copyright issues.
Unofficial support for Windows Timeline was also briefly available via an extension, but it was taken down last week due to trademark issues. A ‘fixed’ version of the extension is reportedly still pending review, but will hopefully be available soon.
