Sending Desktop Web Notifications from Web Browsers

When we think push notifications, our mind goes mobile. However, not to be overlooked is the power of web notifications, notifications that are pushed to users on web browsers.

We saw the massive growth of the mobile messaging app Yo, so we thought why not turn that app to the web and create “Oi,” a web application that enables you to send Oi to other browser users using web notifications.

Currently with the W3C Web Notifications API, web notifications are supported by Opera, Chrome, Firefox, and Safari, and for the purposes of this blog’s demo, our tutorial is compatible with those four popular browsers.

We wrote a full web notifications tutorial on building Oi, available on Dev.Opera, the Opera Developer’s blog. All the code you need, as well as a live-working web notifications demo is available on their blog.

For the working demonstration, open up a couple browsers and send messages between to see it in action!

Web Notifications Value

The value of this tutorial is that it combines a couple cool features for web notifications. For one, messages are sent between web browsers in under a 1/4 second, which means there are no delays between sending and receiving the messages.

Also, we’ve built in presence functionality, which gives you real-time insight into who is available to receive the web notifications. If the user closes out of their web browser, they are instantly removed from the list of active users.

Other Web Notifications Resources

• If you’re specifically looking for a tutorial on building a Chrome Extension to send web notifications, we also have a tutorial written for that. Unlike the tutorial above, this will only work with Google Chrome, but allows users to edit the contents of the notification.
• The tutorials use the PubNub JavaScript SDKs for Pub/Sub Messaging, and that’s how we get the core web notifications functionality.