Chrome (Web) notifications in Windows Action Center

Chrome (Web) notifications in Windows Action Center

Chrome (Web) notifications in Windows Action Center

One of the very useful features of Chrome browser is its ability to show us notifications. This is not just the web pages that are currently opened but also the ones which are offline (we should have subscribed to one previously). This is very useful when you have subscribed to some news sources or applications like Facebook, Gmail you receive them when the page generates a notification it is pushed to your computer. This will look like below

This will appear until you dismiss this.  One great advantage is that a similar feature is available in mobile too, you may have to subscribe to the mobile separately.  This will require to be implemented by the web site/application and user should give consent to receive that specific notification.

HTML 5 notification API is responsible for generating these notifications.  The notifications API is integrated to Chrome and other browsers such as Firefox and Edge But between these browsers a uniform implementation is missing.  Since Chrome is widely used between different operating systems, it makes this notification implementation very interesting and most of the features work clearly and it feels more complete compared to the other browser implementations.

The only area where the Chrome is falling short is the consistency of this notification user interface.This is not aligned with the other notifications that come along with Windows. Most of the applications in Windows have very different implementation as far as notifications are concerned.  Microsoft is trying very hard to unify this through the action center in Windows.  But the adoption is little slow.

Chrome with the recent release of its Canary branch has bridged this gap.  The implementation looks very impressive.  The action center is already capable of taking images and dynamic notification content.

It is interesting to see the custom action buttons in the notifications where users can perform action which will take them directly to the web page and action is performed.

From a web application perspective, the notification integrated to the action center could be of great use where action center lists down all these notifications until it is dismissed.

Typically, when the user is on the computer working on an application can ignore these notifications and continue his work.  The user can collectively look at the notifications and take action one by one.  This can be a big advantage to enterprise line of business applications designed for web browsers to look and work like a desktop application.

Currently this implementation is in Chrome Canary which is not yet a stable version.  We need to wait for this to come into main stream version.  I expect that to happen very soon.

 Balaji | AVP – Technology

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this blog are the writer’s and are not an indication of the company’s view, action or strategy.