Chrome Finally Embraces OS X’s Native Push Notifications

Google is making some changes to Chrome’s notification system to make it work more efficiently and harmoniously on OS X. The company announced on Wednesday that it is enabling OS X’s native notifications on Chrome for Mac in an experimental manner.

Until now, the company was utilising its self-developed notifications on Windows and OS X instead of leveraging OS X’s notification system. The feature is currently in testing phase, so it might not work as efficiently. A Google engineer notes that the final version may look a little different.

Users have been long complaining about Chrome not utilising OS X’s notification system. A user posted the following in Chrome’s support forum in 2013, “Chrome’s notifications are inconsistent with the rest of the OS and apps’ notifications.” Another user chimed in, “If I hadn’t found out about the chrome://flags removal option, I would have stopped using Chrome over this.”

One can enable this feature by pointing their Chrome Web browser to the following link:chrome://flags/#enable-native-notifications and enabling the feature, and performing a restart of the Web browser.

Once you have enabled the feature, you will see it showing similar notifications as several other apps on Mac do. Apple also utilises these notifications to remind users about meetings, holidays, and tell when it is going to restart the computer. Apart from aesthetics value, OS X’s built-in notifications also abide by your computer’s “do not disturb” settings. This should please a lot of users.