This new flag showed up in Chrome OS Canary Channel couple of days ago, New style notification. The description said:
Enables the experiment style of material-design notification #enable-message-center-new-style-notification
I turned it on, restarted my Chromebook and waited. For some reason I did not notice any change that day. However, I noticed this different design for notifications this evening.
For comparison, let me show you how it looked like before this flag:
Now, here is how it looks like now for me:
These new notifications are flat, and white. I am not quite sure if they are supposed to look like this. This could be the first iteration of a new notification system? What they are trying to make Chrome OS notifications look more like Android O notifications?
Future iterations of this notification system might allow developers to customize them. That might be why these are blank / white. That’s just my speculation though.
Anyways, I will keep monitoring these new notifications for you all. Stay tuned to Chrome Story for more on this, and a lot of other exciting Chromebook news.
It looks great. Now, the followup will be its functionality. Hopefully, it’s a successful upload.
If you think that the new notifications look flat and insipid, they are. They have one redeeming feature: they are more compact than what they replaced.
The same cannot bee said about other changes to be rolled out as Material “Design improvements” like the new Settings page, which takes much more screen space, is hard to read and offers practically no advantages over the old.