Saturday, February 22, 2014

Chrome Notifications Out of Beta

A few weeks ago Google released Chrome Notifications within a beta version for Windows, OS X and Chrome OS. The beta version brought Google Now to the desktop which has been a mobile only service thus far. This means you can start receiving useful information such as weather, the route back home, flight information and more effortlessly. Now, Chrome Notifications seem to be out of beta for Mac users. With a simple update a bell shaped button will begin showing up on your menu-bar behaving as a hub for all notifications sent by Chrome Apps and Extensions. However, surprisingly Google Now seems to be absent at the moment. Originally, in the beta version, there existed three buttons instead of the two present now. This included a mute button, a settings button and a cards button for Google Now which is lacking from the update.


Also, it appears that there are no options for disabling Chrome Notifications or at least hiding it from the menu-bar. One work around is to type chrome://flags in the Chrome search bar then search the page for "Enable Rich Notifications" and selecting disable in the drop down menu. Then, just relaunch Chrome and the icon will disappear. Reversing the process should simply require switching from disable back to default but it doesn't seem to be working at the moment.
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