Another interesting (yet never shipped) take on notifications by Mozilla:

http://jbalogh.me/2012/01/30/push-notifications/

These would have allowed sites to send you notifications after you had left the page, like iOS's push notifications work.

They have something similar still: https://wiki.mozilla.org/WebAPI/PushAPI

NB: That is an outdated spec. The spec that is actively being developed is here:

https://wiki.mozilla.org/WebAPI/SimplePush

In this UX mockup it shows it working with gmail https://bug629280.bugzilla.mozilla.org/attachment.cgi?id=520...

Is this API compatible with Chrome's implementation, or would Google have to add support in Gmail for Firefox?

GMail uses a old draft version of the API, and they check for the vendor-specific window.webkitNotification rather than the spec window.Notification, so a Firefox add-on or a GMail update is necessary.

Chrome has an old implementation but as far as I can tell also supports the new one

http://jsbin.com/notification/1/edit works in chrome and firefox

If apps are using the old spec they may need to switch before both browsers work

Gmail uses Webkit- prefixes in API and it thus cannot work yet with Firefox

I'm loving that any mozilla.org post reaches the frontpage easily. Nightly is the best browser I've used.

I'm going to have to test drive Firefox this week. I've been hearing a lot great things lately.

I recommend the Firefox Aurora channel. It's a nice balance between bleeding edge and beta. That said, I've used Firefox Nightly for years and I've found bugs, as expected, but nothing critical.

One caveat is that some people are annoyed by the daily update notifications. If you set the about:config pref "app.update.silent" to true, Firefox should never show you an update dialog:

http://kb.mozillazine.org/App.update.silent

So like chrome does, they're implementing their own notification method, and not integrating with the host OS's notification method?

that's a little disappointing.

Windows 7 and below doesn't have notifications.

There's the tray bubbles, but indeed, they aren't great. The point is, there should be custom ones only for platforms that lack them.

I'll be interested to see what measure are taken to prevent spam. This seems like a useful feature, and I wouldn't want it to become the new popup ad.

You have to authorize every domain that wants to use the notifications. Besides that, it has to be a user action, the authorization. You can't automate this process without some hacking.

Love the notification API for my webapps. Wish there was a sign of IE adopting this technique so i can implement this mainstream.

There's a lot of contenders for that cosy bottom-right corner of my screen. I hope the location of the panel stream is configurable.

I guess there will be addons which can take over the notification system and customize how notifications are displayed

I really hope they find a way to support native mac os notifications.

That's being tracked in https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=852648

Yeah, I hope so too. Currently, they look pretty tacky and are not configurable as far as I know.

Ditto for Ubuntu/Linux!

Some mockups from comment #18: http://shorlander.dropmark.com/80842

Now if only Outlook Web App used this style of notifications instead of an in-page popup, it would finally be simple to ditch Outlook in companies that still use Exchange.

This will be similar to the Chrome Notifications in the lower right hand corner? I could not find a screenshot of what these might look like.