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Notifications on Google Chrome are basically dead… well, at least the ones the browser itself generates. A while ago, the company made an effort to join its notifications with the user’s OS-bound notification center and, depending on how you’ve set that up (or not), that can end up being more annoying to deal with. Fortunately, there’s a way to bypass that nonsense!

What sort of nonsense am I talking about? Well, I can only attest from using Windows, but first and foremost are those drawn-out notification jingles. Second, each notification shows up one at a time which is great when you have a whole stack of them lined up. And then there’s this weirdo hitbox where the notification takes up more space than it appears to do (pictured above).

What Microsoft really should do is fix these problems. But until that happens, you can switch those notifications back over to Chrome by opening up a window and entering chrome://flags into the address bar. You can also commit the same tweak to your Chromium-based browser by replacing “chrome” with the name of your alternative.

Pros just go straight to chrome://flags/#enable-native-notifications

The specific flag you’ll want to search for from the vast list is “Enable native notifications.” All you have to do after that is disable it.

That’s about it! Chrome will now be responsible again for delivering notifications from your most important and favorite sites.

There are some doubts about the longevity of this workaround after the flag was disabled for Chrome’s M85 release, but it was brought back in M86 and should be around through at least M90.


New name, same flag

If you’re on the stable version of Chrome 90, you may have noticed that your OS’s notification center has started delivering pushes again and that you can’t find the flag as it was originally named. It’s still around, though under a new name: #enable-system-notifications.

Just head to chrome://flags/#enable-system-notifications, disable the flag, and Chrome will be in charge again. We checked Chromium-based Microsoft Edge, too, but did not find the flag under any name. As of now, this should be around until at least M94.

Google apparently made the switch as part of its respectful and inclusive code reviews.