Microsoft has changed Notifications in Visual Studio 2013 and are proud of it. There are also the new Feedback button and User Information Card.

I personally hate this kind of uncontrolled buttons in my development environment. Searching Google for a way to remove this nonsense I found two solutions

• Use Visual Commander to hide the buttons (with a timer to keep hiding them 😕 )
• Hack the registery [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\12.0_Config\MainWindowFrameControls]

I removed the Feedback Button, UserNotifications Badge and User Information Card with the registry hack. There is an Option in Visual Studio to hide the Quick Launch or I could use the registry to hide that.

And finally a clean development environment:

All disabled items are available in the menu. Feedback under Help, Notifications under View and Account Settings under File.

Registry hacking at your own risk, make sure you have a backup.