After more testing I think it’s a problem of the websites using the PushAPI. But that would lead to the question whether the website should be able to decide how long or even if the message should stay at all in the notification center.

I as the enduser of the notification center client (Google Chrome) would like to be able to decide.

Can you replicate this on the following website?

https://tests.peter.sh/notification-generator/

The "Req. interaction" switch allows you to decide between banners (unchecked) and alerts (checked). Banners should stay on-screen for a couple of seconds before being moved to the notification center, alerts should stay on-screen indefinitely. Unless you changed the settings in the Mac OS X notification panel.

It seems that with your demo site it works perfectly but it doesn’t work with other sites (like helpscout.net) where the banners appear, go away automatically but CANNOT be found in the notification center afterwards anymore.

I made a short desktop screen video to illustrate the problem: https://youtu.be/6MkC-0LbrdI

Yeah, it looks like the website is deciding themselves when it's time for the notification to go. We (strongly) recommend sites not to do that because, as you noticed, it breaks user expectations.

It's infeasible to remove the ability to close notifications from the API however, as it's important for various other use-cases. There's very little we can do here I'm afraid.

Perhaps reach out to the website and point them to this comment? Feel free to quote me on this too.

I will ask helpscout.net to change that. But wouldn’t it be nice to have somewhat more configurability in Chrome on an per website basis? Where you as a user could override the settings of the website, e.g. for helpscout.net I personally would decide to let those notifications stay in the notification center - like forever.