Notification

The Notification interface of the Notifications API is used to configure and display desktop notifications to the user.

Constructor

Notification()

Creates a new instance of the Notification object.

Properties

Static properties

These properties are available only on the Notification object itself.

Notification.permission Read only

A string representing the current permission to display notifications. Possible value are: denied (the user refuses to have notifications displayed), granted (the user accepts having notifications displayed), or default (the user choice is unknown and therefore the browser will act as if the value were denied).

Instance properties

These properties are available only on instances of the Notification object.

Notification.title Read only

The title of the notification as specified in the options parameter of the constructor.

Notification.dir Read only

The text direction of the notification as specified in the options parameter of the constructor.

Notification.lang Read only

The language code of the notification as specified in the options parameter of the constructor.

Notification.body Read only

The body string of the notification as specified in the options parameter of the constructor.

Notification.tag Read only

The ID of the notification (if any) as specified in the options parameter of the constructor.

Notification.icon Read only

The URL of the image used as an icon of the notification as specified in the options parameter of the constructor.

Notification.data Read only

Returns a structured clone of the notification’s data.

Notification.requireInteraction Read only

A Boolean indicating that on devices with sufficiently large screens, a notification should remain active until the user clicks or dismisses it.

Notification.silent Read only

Specifies whether the notification should be silent, i.e. no sounds or vibrations should be issued, regardless of the device settings.

Notification.timestamp Read only

Specifies the time at which a notification is created or applicable (past, present, or future).

Unsupported properties

The following properties are listed in the most up-to-date spec, but are not supported in any browsers yet. It is advisable to keep checking back regularly to see if the status of these has updated, and let us know if you find any out of date information.

Notification.noscreen Read only

Specifies whether the notification firing should enable the device's screen or not.

Notification.renotify Read only

Specifies whether the user should be notified after a new notification replaces an old one.

Notification.sound Read only

Specifies a sound resource to play when the notification fires, in place of the default system notification sound.

Notification.sticky Read only

Specifies whether the notification should be 'sticky', i.e. not easily clearable by the user.

Notification.vibrate Read only

Specifies a vibration pattern for devices with vibration hardware to emit.

Event handlers

Notification.onclick

A handler for the click event. It is triggered each time the user clicks on the notification.

Notification.onerror

A handler for the error event. It is triggered each time the notification encounters an error.

Obsolete handlers

The following event handlers are still supported as listed in the browser compatibility section below, but are no longer listed in the current spec. I is safe therefore to assume they are obsolete, and may stop working in future browser versions.

Notification.onclose

A handler for the close event. It is triggered when the user closes the notification.

Notification.onshow

A handler for the show event. It is triggered when the notification is displayed.

Methods

Static methods

These methods are available only on the Notification object itself.

Notification.requestPermission()

Requests permission from the user to display notifications.

Instance methods

These properties are available only on an instance of the Notification object or through its prototype. The Notification object also inherits from the EventTarget interface.

Notification.close()

Programmatically closes a notification.

Example

Assume this basic HTML:

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

It's possible to send a notification as follows — here we present a fairly verbose and complete set of code you could use if you wanted to first check whether notifications are supported, then check if permission has been granted for the current origin to send notifications, then request permission if required, before then sending a notification.

function notifyMe() {
  // Let's check if the browser supports notifications
  if (!("Notification" in window)) {
    alert("This browser does not support desktop notification");
  }

  // Let's check whether notification permissions have already been granted
  else if (Notification.permission === "granted") {
    // If it's okay let's create a notification
    var notification = new Notification("Hi there!");
  }

  // Otherwise, we need to ask the user for permission
  else if (Notification.permission !== 'denied') {
    Notification.requestPermission(function (permission) {
      // If the user accepts, let's create a notification
      if (permission === "granted") {
        var notification = new Notification("Hi there!");
      }
    });
  }

  // At last, if the user has denied notifications, and you 
  // want to be respectful there is no need to bother them any more.
}

In many cases, you don't need to be this verbose. For example, in our Emogotchi demo (see source code), we simply run Notification.requestPermission regardless to make sure we can get permission to send notifications (this uses the newer promise-based method syntax):

Notification.requestPermission().then(function(result) {
  console.log(result);
});

Then we run a simple spawnNotification() function when we want to fire a notification — this is passed arguments to specify the body, icon and title we want, then it creates the necessary options object and fires the notification using the Notification() constructor.

function spawnNotification(theBody,theIcon,theTitle) {
  var options = {
      body: theBody,
      icon: theIcon
  }
  var n = new Notification(theTitle,options);
}

Specifications

Browser compatibility

[1] Before Chrome 22, the support for notification followed an old prefixed version of the specification and used the navigator.webkitNotifications object to instantiate a new notification.

Before Chrome 32, Notification.permission was not supported.

Before Chrome 42, service worker additions were not supported.

Starting in Chrome 49, notifications do not work in incognito mode.

[2] Prior to Firefox 22 (Firefox OS <1.2), the instantiation of a new notification must be done with the navigator.mozNotification object through its createNotification method.

Prior to Firefox 22 (Firefox OS <1.2), the Notification was displayed when calling the show method and supported only the click and close events.

Nick Desaulniers wrote a Notification shim to cover both newer and older implementations.

One particular Firefox OS issue is that you can pass a path to an icon to use in the notification, but if the app is packaged you cannot use a relative path like /my_icon.png. You also can't use window.location.origin + "/my_icon.png" because window.location.origin is null in packaged apps. The manifest origin field fixes this, but it is only available in Firefox OS 1.1+. A potential solution for supporting Firefox OS <1.1 is to pass an absolute URL to an externally hosted version of the icon. This is less than ideal as the notification is displayed immediately without the icon, then the icon is fetched, but it works on all versions of Firefox OS.

When using notifications  in a Firefox OS app, be sure to add the desktop-notification permission in your manifest file. Notifications can be used at any permission level, hosted or above: "permissions": { "desktop-notification": {} }

[3] Safari started to support notification with Safari 6, but only on Mac OSX 10.8+ (Mountain Lion).

See also

• Using the Notifications API