Chrome braces for Google Now integration with new Notification Center

Google looks set to bring Google Now integration to its browser Chrome, with a Notification Center feature making an appearance in the latest build of Chromium, the open source project that shares code with Google's Chrome.

The feature was spotted by Francois Beaufort over on Google+, The Next Web notes.

Rich templated notifications are now available through the new Notification Center in the last Windows chromium build available at download-chromium.appspot.com/dl/Win.

To see them in action, you need to toggle "Enable Rich Notifications" flag in chrome://flags.
Screenshot below shows you how to create a notification within a chrome extension but this also works with regular HTML5 notifications.

As you probably guessed, this Notification Center will be the perfect hub for Google Now cards.

Chromium is the open-source project that provides the backbone to Google's popular Chrome browser. New features found in Chromium typically find their way downstream into Chrome. As The  Next Web notes, Chrome has notifications support as of now, but it is half-baked at best.

Google Now has been a big game-changer since it made its debut on Android 4.1 Jelly Bean. It uses cards that pop up automatically to give user the information as and when needed. It initially started with traffic updates, package delivery notifications and the likes, but Google recently expanded its scope to included additional information like boarding passes that update automatically.

Bringing Google Now to Chrome would be a natural extension of the concept, that would allow users to control how they wish to be notified when they are working on the desktop, instead of the mobile device.

Screenshot courtesy Francois Beaufort