How To Disable Chrome’s Google Now Notifications

Google recently rolled out an update that added Google Now support to its Chrome browser on both Windows and Mac. That’s great if you use Google services. If you don’t, it tends to just repeatedly tell you the current weather. Here’s how to disable it.

To turn off the new notifications, you have a couple different options. First off, you can just disable the Google Now notifications:

1. Click the bell icon in the lower-right corner of your screen on Windows, or in the menu bar on your Mac
2. Click the gear icon
3. Uncheck the “Google Now” box

That disables the Google Now notifications but leaves other Chrome notifications. However, if you want to purge your computer of all Google’s obnoxious (to some) notifications (and that bell icon you didn’t ask for or permit to exist), you need to do one more thing:

1. In Chrome, type chrome://flags into the URL bar
2. Search for “Enable Rich Notifications” and “Enable Experimental UI for Notifications” and set both to “Disabled”
3. Relaunch Chrome

Now, the bell will be gone, and Chrome will stop pestering you with notifications. Of course, if Google didn’t automatically turn on those new notifications for you and you want to check them out, just set those notifications to “Enabled” to turn them on.