The Google Chrome experience is always evolving, and the popular web browser will soon pick up a new feature which lets it run nicer in Windows 10. As noted by Windows Latest, Google is adding a capability to an upcoming release that will integrate Chrome Progressive Web Apps with notification badges in the system taskbar.
According to development documentation posted by Google, the feature is part of a new Badging API. This will allow for any installed Chrome web apps that have been pinned to a taskbar in Windows to set a badge to notify the user of certain activities. Seen to the right, an example provided by Google includes Twitter, for which the icon can show an “8” for unread notifications, and also another app with more of a flag-style icon. The feature is also coming to MacOS but it is not clear how notifications badges will be made visible on that platform.
Google notes the feature can carry over to productivity websites, games, and other chat apps. It is available for testing in Chrome Canary 73 beta on Windows 10, but it is not immediately known when this feature will make it to the general public running stable versions of the browser.
Secondary documentation posted on the Chromium commit also suggests that Google could be making it easier to install Progressive Web Apps directly from the address and search bar. A flag is already available to test the functionality in Google Chrome Canary, but it does not appear to function as intended. “Add flag for Omnibox installation button for PWA sites. This CL adds a feature flag for the new omnibox installation button for PWAs,” explains the code commit.
Support for Progressive Web app badge notifications would be one of many new features coming to Google Chrome soon. It was previously confirmed that the browser would respect the dark mode settings in both Windows 10 and MacOS, and also allow for consumers to use the multimedia keys to control videos on certain web pages. There’s even a set of new themes which just became available. The color choices range from black, slate, oceanic, ultra violet, classic blue, banana, black and white, honeysuckle, rose, serenity, and more.
