How to get download complete notifications in Chrome

When you’re downloading a file in Chrome, the Chrome icon in the taskbar, or Dock if you’re on macOS, will indicate download progress. This indicator is silent for the most part; it doesn’t do anything once the download is complete. If you’d like more obvious, hard to ignore, download complete notifications in Chrome, you can try one of two things.

Chrome native notifications flag

This is an old method and by old, we mean it worked one year ago. You should give it a try first since it’s a native option. Open Chrome and in the URL bar, enter the following, and tap the Enter key.

chrome://flags

On the Chrome Flags page, look for the Enable native notifications flag, and enable it from the dropdown. Relaunch Chrome, and check if you get a desktop notification when a download completes. Make sure that you’ve allowed Chrome to show notifications on your desktop. This is a setting that you will have to check from your OS’ own notification settings.

Download Notifier

In case the above method doesn’t work, you’re going to have to use an extension to get download complete notifications in Chrome. Install Download Notifier from the Chrome Web Store. When you install the extension, it takes you to its options page where you can enable audio alerts for a completed download, and also disable the downloads bar in Chrome, if you want.

You can leave both these options unchecked. The extension will work just fine without them enabled. Whenever a download completes in Chrome, you will see a desktop notification telling you the download is complete. This notification is going to be interactive. It will have two buttons; one for opening the file that was just downloaded, and one for opening the folder that it was downloaded to.

You can dismiss the notification, or it will go away on its own after a while. When you do not interact with the notification, it goes to the Action Center (on Windows 10) or the Notification Center (on macOS). From there, you can interact with the notification if you want to i.e., you can open the downloaded file, or you can open the folder it was downloaded to.

Again, Chrome will need permission to show you desktop notifications and these permissions must be granted through your operating system’s notification settings. If after enabling Chrome notifications for the desktop, you also start getting notifications from various websites e.g., Facebook, or Twitter, you will have to disable notifications for them from their respective site settings. You can go to these settings by visiting the website and clicking the padlock icon in the URL bar.