527846 - Implement a web notifications API

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 573588

(Core :: DOM: Core & HTML, enhancement)

Description

[Eli Grey (:sephr)]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-US) AppleWebKit/532.4 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/4.0.237.0 Safari/532.4
Build Identifier: 

nsIAlertsService's showAlertNotification method could be very useful for web content. For example, Gmail could use it to notify the user of new emails and clicking on the notification could open the email in Gmail (and possibly focus the tab?). It could be accessible via window.showNotification (akin to Prism's platform.showNotification). Some possible changes to make it easier to use for web content could be defaulting the icon to the page's favicon and the name to location.hostname.

The method is already being exposed to web content running in Prism via platform.showNotification (though it doesn't take the same arguments).

Reproducible: Always

Comment 1

[Benjamin Smedberg]

Is there a spec?

Comment 2

[Eli Grey (:sephr)]

No spec. Also, if we expose this functionality to web content, it shouldn't be as limited as Prism's platform.showNotification, which doesn't allow adding event listeners. As stated in the example, it should be possible to listen for click events.

Comment 3

[Jordan Gutterman]

A Notifications API was considered for the the HTML5 spec at some point and there was a lot of discussion on the WHATWG list. The closest thing to a spec I can find is http://sites.google.com/a/chromium.org/dev/developers/design-documents/desktop-notifications/api-specification but I don't know how much consensus that got.

Comment 4

[Eli Grey (:sephr)]

Changing the bug to be in general about implementing some kind of web notifications API.

Comment 5

[Olli Pettay [:smaug][[e-mail]]]

There is now also an editor's draft
http://dev.w3.org/2006/webapi/WebNotifications/publish/
but that has still lots of open issues.

Comment 6

[d]

Web Notifications are now being shipped as a feature of Google Chrome 4.0+. Also, considering there now is a spec, the title of this bug should probably be "Implement the web notifications API".

Comment 7

[Olli Pettay [:smaug][[e-mail]]]

There is no spec. There is a draft spec, which in its current form has
many problems and API isn't very good. This has been discussed @ webapp mailing list.

Comment 8

[Nickolay_Ponomarev]

This is similar to bug 293412, but both bugs have interesting comments, so not duping for now.

Comment 9

[Matic]

Check:

http://www.chromium.org/developers/design-documents/desktop-notifications/api-specification

http://0xfe.blogspot.com/2010/04/desktop-notifications-with-webkit.html

As a web developer of social applications I find this extremely useful for people using the site. They could be informed when they get a PM in their inbox, something happens to the topics/blogs/people they are following, someone wants to chat with them, ... The possibilities are endless. This should be implemented ASAP.

Comment 10

[Doug Turner (:dougt)]

working on this API here in bug 573588.