What ways are out there to display a desktop notification from a web app?

Question

What I would like to do is show a toaster like notification preferably but any method of "pushing" updates to the desktop is interesting.

Thanks

Answer 1

Below is a working example of desktop notifications for Chrome, Firefox, Opera and Safari, copied from Chrome desktop notification example.
Try it live on JSBin.

// request permission on page load
document.addEventListener('DOMContentLoaded', function () {
  if (Notification.permission !== "granted")
    Notification.requestPermission();
});

function notifyMe() {
  if (!Notification) {
    alert('Desktop notifications not available in your browser. Try Chromium.'); 
    return;
  }

  if (Notification.permission !== "granted")
    Notification.requestPermission();
  else {
    var notification = new Notification('Notification title', {
      icon: 'http://cdn.sstatic.net/stackexchange/img/logos/so/so-icon.png',
      body: "Hey there! You've been notified!",
    });

    notification.onclick = function () {
      window.open("https://stackoverflow.com/a/13328397/1269037");      
    };

  }

}

<button onclick="notifyMe()">Notify me!</button>

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More information about how this works in my answer to Chrome desktop notification example.