Instagram Will Finally Allow Users To Receive Browser Notifications

If you’re like me, you like to procrastinate at work. Luckily, I get to work from home and don’t have to worry about a boss peeking over my shoulder any time I whip out my phone. If you’re one of those who get to experience this and you’re an avid Instagram user, there’s good news—Users will soon be able to get notifications when using Instagram through a browser on their PC.

First spotted by Android Police, Instagram now has browser notification support. So, anytime you see an Instagram notification pop on your phone, you can head on over to Chrome, Safari, or the Firefox browser to peep that notification. You can view things like new followers, likes, or comments—The service will ask for permission first, and then notify you whenever there’s any activity on your accounts such as for as new followers, likes, or comments.

Although you’ve long been able to scroll through Instagram News Feed via a browser, the best experience was always via the mobile app. This makes sense, as Instagram has always been a mobile-first offering, and the team behind it have been happy to keep it that way—But ensuring that mobile app users are the only ones with a true Instagram experience creates a barrier to entry for those who can’t access the app for any reason.

This is great for Instagram users who spend a chunk of their time in front of a computer. Now, the only thing the company needs to do is allow its users to upload pictures and videos. Also, the ability to send direct messages would be a nice touch too. At this point, it’s unclear whether the company will actually put this into place.

The functionality will works across both desktop and mobile and has also come to Instagram Lite, the service’s alternative low-data, low-resource app. The pop-up notification feature while logging in via Google Chrome is slowly rolling out to users over the next 24 hours.