Gecko/Firefox support for HTML5 Notifications

jAndy picture jAndy · Jun 9, 2010 · Viewed 10.5k times · Source

I'm wondering if there is any build-in support for the HTML5 Notification feature in Gecko browsers so far? Maybe some hidden developer thingy ?

I'm aware of WebKits window.webkitNotifications which works great, so, is there a Firefox implementation ?

Update

After searching and reading some W3C HTML5 specs, I'm maybe a little bit off here. I can't find any Notification feature anywhere there. Am I facing wrong facts here? Is that just a "very own webkit implementation"?

Answer

Marcel Korpel picture Marcel Korpel · Jun 9, 2010

To start with your second question: no, it's not a WebKit-specific feature. But although a site called ‘html5rocks’ contains a demo of this, Notifications are still not part of HTML 5. There was a discussion about them on the WHATWG mailing list this year (read the messages with subject ‘Notification API’). They are mentioned again in a later message.

So, what do we have? A description of the Notification API in Chromium. A W3C Editor's Draft of a specification, based on Chromium's API (but independent of HTML 5).

Mozilla mentioned Notifications as part of their Prism project. E.g., beginning with Prism 0.9 Notifications are a part of Prism:

The first desktop integration features made an appearance. These included popup notifications and dock badging. A special JavaScript file called webapp.js contains Prism-specific code for customizing a web app.

You can read on on the Prism Wiki:

Prism is available as an extension for Firefox 3 or as a standalone application.

And from the FAQ:

Prism is the codename for the project, and if the functionality provided by Prism becomes a product or is integrated into other products (like Firefox), then it won't necessarily continue to be called by this codename.