Notifications in Google Chrome are basically dead … well, at least the ones that the browser itself generates. Some time ago, the company made an effort to add its notifications to the user notification center linked to the operating system and, depending on how you set this up (or not), this can be more boring to deal with. Fortunately, there is a way around this nonsense!
What kind of nonsense am I talking about? Well, we can only attest using Windows, but first of all it’s those extended jingles. Second, each notification is displayed one at a time, which is great when you have an entire stack of them aligned. And there is this weird hitbox where the notification takes up more space than it looks (photo above).
What Microsoft really needs to do is fix these problems. But until that happens, you can change those notifications back to Chrome by opening a window and inserting chrome: // flags in the address bar. You can also make the same adjustment in your Chromium-based browser, replacing “chrome” in chrome: // flags with the name of your alternative.
Professionals go straight to chrome: // flags / # enable-native-Notifications
The specific flag you want to search for in the vast list is “Enable native notifications” to disable it.
That’s about it! Chrome will now again be responsible for delivering notifications for your most important and favorite sites.
There are some doubts about the longevity of this workaround after the flag was disabled for the launch of Chrome’s M85, but it was brought back on the M86 and should be around at least M90.
