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For as long as I’ve used a Chromebook, there’s a particular UI element that has never changed. It’s been in the same spot and behaved the same way as long as I can remember, and I used it often.
What item is that, you may ask? The clear all notifications button.
It seems like a little thing, I’ll admit, but as I ventured back into Dev Channel this week to play with all the new, fun Linux upgrades, I’ve had to adjust to some of the new UI changes that have come along for the ride.
One of those new elements is the system tray. No longer do you have a split between tray functions (like WIFI, Bluetooth and system volume) and notification options. Instead, the entire mix is in one simple, sleek menu.
And I love it! Chrome OS has borrowed from Android for this UI piece and it is totally the right move. Gabriel has written about this before and it’s been around for a bit, so I’m not going into any more detail for now. You can just check out his article on that.
What I immediately was missing, however, was my clear all notifications button. As the notifications continued to stack up over there, I ended up just dismissing them one by one. It felt clunky and outdated, to say the least.
Honestly, I just thought it was a bug. Surely they wouldn’t have removed that functionality on purpose, right?
Turns out, I was just missing something simple. Today, when looking at the system tray on my Pixelbook along with Gabriel, he pointed out the silly placement of the clear all notifications.
Wait…what? Yeah, turns out the button is still there, but it is a bit hard to find. If you expand you system tray and have a few notifications up top, all you have to do is swipe or scroll up just a bit and the new clear all button will show itself. Check it out below.
So, like I said, it is simple and easy to use: it is just difficult to find! Hopefully some of you searching for that missing button will find this helpful! And one quick note: this works as explained in the Dev Channel, but the new system tray is available in Stable Channel if you turn on a flag. However, this “clear all” option has not made it to Stable Channel just yet.
