Google Kills Windows, OS X Chrome Notification Center That No One Ever Used

Since 2010, Google has offered support in the desktop version of Chrome for push notifications. To help make that feature even more useful, it eventually introduced a notification center, not too dissimilar from what Microsoft offers in Windows 10. With an emerging push standard, though, Google has been forced to reevaluate things.

Via a new blog post, Google lets us know that it will be removing that push notification center from all desktop versions of Chrome (Windows/Linux/OS X). What makes this decision easy for Google to make is that it seems very little people actually made use of it. Writes Justin DeWitt, a Chrome software engineer, "in practice, few users visit the notification center."

I've been a Chrome user since about the same time Google added push notifications to Chrome, and I admit that in all that time, I've seen very few services take advantage of it. In fact, most that I have seen have been Google services, such as DoubleClick. Interestingly, rTorrent, an open source Web-based torrent client, also supports it. Personally, I find very little use for these, but I am still glad they will be retained by this open standard.

What I don't ever remember seeing, though, is the notification center that Google is about to remove. It's either never stood out to me, or I've just managed to avoid it very stealthily. This could be one of the reasons Google has found that it's been so mildly used. But even so, it seems like this is a feature that most people won't mind going the way of the dodo anyway, because we generally have enough notifications to deal with as is!