Chrome 59 is out: Bug fixes, native macOS notifications, Windows 10 Action Center support in the works
This image shows the Chrome notification action buttons, left, versus the new macOS notification with action buttons.
Google has released Chrome 59 stable with native notifications on macOS, and more Material Design changes to browser settings.
Chrome 59 is available for Windows, Mac, and Linux, but this version most notably displays Chrome notifications in Apple's desktop Notification Center.
Google started development of native Chrome notifications for macOS last year and flagged their arrival with the Chrome 59 beta last month. Besides following macOS notification design guidelines, notifications from Chrome will also abide by the macOS Do Not Disturb setting.
All Chrome notifications will bear the Chrome logo in the macOS notification box rather than the web developer's logo, as they did with Chrome's notification system.
Developers may need to adjust their Chrome notifications to conform with Apple's guidelines. For example, embedded images are no longer supported on macOS. There are several changes to Chrome extensions that use notifications, which Google has outlined.
Chrome may soon also support native Windows notification. Nearly two years ago, Chromium developers flatly refused requests for Chrome to support the Windows 10 Action Center notifications, in part to maintain consistency with the then more widely-used Windows 7 and Windows 8.
The Chromium team tagged the request as 'WontFix' and told users that "maybe we can revisit it in a few years when most users are on Win 10 :)". Since then the Chromium team has changed the status of this request from 'WontFix' to 'available'.
There's no timeline for Action Center support, but in March a Chromium developer said the team was "still very much interested" in adding it.
"We'll just have to revise a timeline in which it's feasible to implement support for this," the developer said.
Chrome 59 also introduces Headless Chromium allowing it to run in a server environment for purposes such as automating web-application testing with tools such as Selenium.
Finally, Google has rolled out Material Design for the Chrome Settings page. It started the work over a year ago, but that had to be manually enabled though Chrome flags.
The new Settings page features a cleaner look with a search box to find relevant settings, and the familiar hamburger menu at the top-left corner with shortcuts to people, appearance, search engine, default, and start-up settings.
Chrome 59 brings 30 security fixes, 16 of which were reported by third-party researchers. Google paid bug reporters $23,500 in this update. The highest bug bounty of $7,500 went to a Qihoo 360 Vulcan Team researcher for a the confusion error in Chrome's V8 JavaScript engine.