Mozilla wants to push notifications to browsers and devices

Mozilla developer Jeff Balogh has been presenting plans to bring iOS and Android style push notifications to the web. Mozilla is already creating prototypes of the service and designing an API. The system allows users to give sites from which they wish to receive notifications a URL where they can send those notifications. The URL is a secret between the web site and the user and only handed to the web site when the user grants permission.

When a site wants to send a notification, it sends it to the URL it has been given; the notification service at that location then takes on the task of delivering the message. Balogh says the plan is for the notification service to identify the correct device or desktop to send the notification to and avoid sending duplicate notifications to multiple devices.

The proposals are browser-neutral and use standard web technologies to initially pass the notifications to the server. However, the mechanisms for the actual pushing of the notification from servers to devices are not detailed in current proposals on the wiki page. The handling of notifications when they arrive at a device or browser is also currently not discussed.

(djwm)