Many of you likely use Google Calendar to stay on top of all the appointments, meetings and other items you have each and every day. It’s a great product from Google and has loads of third-party app support for other platforms like Android and iOS. With Google Calendar you can receive notifications to tell you when your next meeting is and it can be a big help in planning out the rest of your day. Before, Google had pop-ups as well as email notifications for Google Calendar, which you could configure for each event as well as setting defaults. As of today, Google has implemented web notifications for Google Calendar. It was part of the Gentle Notifications lab, and it’s now a fully supported feature in Google Calendar. It’ll work in Google Chrome as well as other web browsers that support web notifications. Essentially, it is using the native browser notifications, instead of interrupting what you are doing to alert you of an upcoming event on your calendar.
If you are an existing lab user, the new web notifications feature is already activated for you. If you aren’t, then you’re going to need to opt-in. You can do this by simply turning on browser notifications from the settings menu that is located inside Google Calendar. Pretty simple, but it’s also in a place where many people won’t see it. Google’s blog post notes that it may take up to 3 days for the feature to be visible for everyone. So if you are not seeing the feature in Google Calendar Settings just yet, hang on for a few days and you should see it soon. Of course, these new notifications are only on desktop, seeing as they are browser notifications.
These web notifications are available for other services too (like Facebook) so you can receive notifications even when that tab isn’t open. More importantly, these notifications are silent and appear in the upper right-hand corner of your screen. So they will get your attention, but not distract you from what you are working on. A great way to stay on top of things, like today’s schedule with Google Calendar