If you are a keen user of Google’s Chrome browser, then you may have noticed the Notification Centre. It is a hub for notifications from all Chrome apps and has been in existence for at least the last two years. If you have no idea what it is then fret not, you are not alone. Just about everyone who uses Chrome has no idea what it is and neither do they even bother to ever use it. Save for the power users and others heavily invested in Google’s ecosystem, Notification Centre has not been as busy as Google envisioned.
As a result, Google is pulling the plug on that feature starting with the next Chrome update on Macs, Windows and Linux machines. Since it is essential to the working of Chrome OS which is heavily reliant on the Chrome browser, it lives to see another day on that platform.
This development comes at a time when Microsoft has been busy rolling out its latest version of the Windows operating system, Windows 10. One of the key features of Windows 10 is Action Centre, a unified notification centre where users can go to once in a while from their task bars to have a glance at the latest notifications be they from Outlook (email) or messaging applications like Telegram. This is to say that even though only few people ever got to use Notification Centre, at least according to Google, it’s place on the desktop is not lost. We’ve gotten used to receiving notifications in one place on our mobile devices and the same is true of the desktop.
