Things are really starting to get busy in the world of Chromium. Yesterday, we noted how the latest developer builds of Chrome were now Snow Leopard-ready. Today brings some other interesting news.
It looks like Chrome is about to gain a new built-in feature called Desktop Notifications. An overview document was recently placed in the Design Documents are of the Chromium Developers site. Basically, it sounds like there is an API that will allow a developer to pop up small messages on a user’s desktop area. I imagine this will look something like the FriendFeed notifications, but those are run through Adobe AIR, this would be run entirely in WebKit.
Interestingly, the documentation notes that for Mac OS users, there will be Growl integration with these notifications. It notes: “On Mac OS, desktop notifications in icon/title/text format will be routed to Growl for display if Growl is installed.” On Linux, the notifications would similarly be routed through DBus, apparently.
These notifications are to be turned off by default for now, but can be turned on using a command line switch. It’s hard to know exactly how these will be used from just reading about them in these documents, but this could be a potentially cool new feature sites can use — or pop-up ads 2.0.
[thanks Sai]
Wow!! Pop Up Ads 2.0
Thats really something spammers will be looking forward to..
The Design Document mentions use of permissions via an InfoBar – presumably like the ‘Do you want Chrome to save your password?’ – e.g. ‘Do you want to allow Friendfeed.com to send you desktop notifications?’ so hopefully it will be difficult to abuse.
it’s probably bound to be popups 2.0
I am not sure how much I like this, that Chrome gets this without going through implementing it into web standards.
But on the other hand this is great feature, and maybe sometimes it is needed that someone goes their own way if innovation is to happen. Look how stuck the video tag issue is.
lol, it’s always how Google does things. Make it first, get people to use it, then make it a standard.
Thats how the HTML5 database API came about.
Apple also did that when they made the Canvas tag.
I agree. If they do a good job and make it ready for standardization, it is a nifty thing to be able to do from js code.
The thing is that they weren’t the first to do this… there is an extension called YIP for Firefox that did this. Website like Meebo have been using this and there are many Greasemonkey scripts so it will work with GMail, Facebook, etc.
Chrome notifications or Ads gun. You choose which name you’ll prefer.
Haven’t tried Chrome. But I have heard amazing things about it. Probably will test it out soon.
I’m not too enamored with Google, but have to say this: Chrome is the fastest, leanest browser I’ve used.
Firefox was my favorite until version 3.0, after which the entire app became slower than an offspring of a snail and a sloth.
FF, you need to innovate again. Even IE is catching up..
This feature will be great for sites like Meebo.com to allow for notifications of incoming messages when browsing in other tabs.
Meebo already has this for Firefox using the YIP extension
http://blog.abi...-participation/
It will hopefully/probably work like http://www.gaur...eolocation.html in firefox with the bar at top asking for premission.
My hunch – It could warn a user of possible bugs in Chrome and encourage him to upgrade or at least download a bugfix.
Cool. The pop-ups related to these desktop notifications will surely present a good experience in web world.
Any idea? What the pop ups intimate?
I’ve been back and forth and back and forth between Firefox and Chrome. Firefox becoming more and more of a slow memory pig… A good improvement to Chrome would make me ditch Firefox for good.
I’ve been back and forth and back and forth between Firefox and Chrome. Firefox is becoming more and more of a slow, memory pig… A good improvement to Chrome would make me ditch Firefox for good.
+100 to the first person to write an arcade game using these notifications. I suggest “whack-a-mole”.
http://en.wikip...iki/Whac-A-Mole
+1
Same here! I have to say Chrome is much more faster than Firefox. Let’s see what is the deal with the pop-ups is. Maybe it’s a good idea afterall.
Hi all. I am using Chrome as my default browser at the moment. When I do that I get to see how the browser works when its called from another app… It has crashed 2x over the last few days…. but I do like the speed of it. A better bookmark feature would be nice… maybe in the future.
“It’s hard to know exactly how these will be used from just reading about them in these documents”
New mail notifications from gmail. Meeting reminders from google calendar.
Hope they integrate this with Growl (for OSX and Windows… not sure if there’s a Growl for Linux but how many people actually use that on the desktop who are Googles target – ie people who click on ads)
I don’t mind installing Growl (the more apps that use it the better), but I’d hate to have to install a different alerting framework for every app I run!
Linux has equivalents to Growl, and if they use DBus (like it says in the article) it will “just work” with modern Linux distros like Ubuntu.
Cool. Must admit despite being an early Ubuntu fan I’ve reverted back to Win7 for a bunch of reasons (though I do like Chrome on win7)
The beginning of the slippery slope of Chrome’s move towards the trash heap.
LOL. Nothing like starting the day with a daily TechCrunch bowel movement of Google Chrome “news.”
But seriously, we get it: you <3 Chrome. Won’t any real news about Chrome get lost in all this fluff?
Don’t be silly. Desktop notifications have long been a feature of Google Gears:
http://code.goo...NotificationAPI
Gears hasn’t implemented it yet.
It’s annoying though, to know that TechCrunch covered the fact that Gears was supposed to get Desktop notifications here: http://www.tech...-accessibility/
But then technically rehashes this news when they hear it’s finally being implemented in Chrome.
I had to redownload my 4GB of IMAP email with Thunderbird and was using the gmail.com interface and would miss Google Chat and Mail notifications as I have about 30 Apps running at any time(all you might get in Firefox is a flashing tab).
I never miss those when Thunderbird uses the Systray to alert me.
Makes 100% sense, especially as more apps move online. Make the browser systray app the default notification area and get Ebay notifications when items sell, or when you get a direct twitter, or when you get a new lead in Salesforce etc. etc.
If you think it is bad idea you simply don’t use the internet the way some of us do.
I can’t believe this doesn’t exist yet, and that more people are not asking for it. I know a girl who confessed to check her hotmail 20 times a day, even though she didn’t even get that many messages. A colossal amount of people’s time goes to unnecessarily checking whether something has happened – something they could be notified about when it happens instead. Even this comments board would benefit. If I was notified in real time that someone replied to this post, I could go back here and we could have an interesting real-time conversation about the importance of real-time conversation! As it is now, I’ll probably forget I ever wrote this, and never go back here again.