[Update: Live] Google Chrome is finally adding support for the Windows 10 Action Center

Update 8/8/18: The feature is now live in the Google Chrome 68 Stable channel, as spotted by Thurrott and announced by Peter Beverloo from Google. The feature image shows the new notification style. The original article follows.

Google Chrome for desktop has support for push notifications built in. You’ve seen the pop up on websites asking if you’d like to enable notifications. Web apps, such as Google Play Music, can also use these notifications to show information. Windows 10 has a notification system called Action Center, but Chrome doesn’t utilize it. That could be changing soon.

This feature has been requested by Windows and Chrome users ever since Windows 10 was released. It doesn’t make a lot of sense to have notifications coming in on two separate systems. Commit number 955244 in Chromium Gerrit shows the ability for users to toggle on Windows native notifications. Users will have to manually opt into using Windows notifications instead of Chrome’s version. The feature will not be enabled by default, at least for now. Here’s the description:

Windows Native Notifications: Enable flag toggling on Windows.

This allows the user to manually opt into using Windows native notifications instead of Chrome’s version of the notifications.

Note: This flag is ignored on versions of Windows old enough not to support native notifications.

This change makes sense for a couple of reasons. Like mentioned above, having multiple notification systems is messy. The more important reason could be Progressive Web Apps (a.k.a. WebAPKs). PWAs are web apps that can use Android APIs. Google has been preparing to launch PWAs for a while. These apps would be able to run in the background and send notifications to Windows 10, similar to how it works on an Android phone.

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