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), ordefault
(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.actions
Read only- The actions array of the notification as specified in the options parameter of the constructor.
Notification.badge
Read only- The URL of the image used to represent the notification when there is not enough space to display thenotification itself.
Notification.body
Read only- The body string 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.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.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.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).
Notification.title
Read only- The title of the notification as specified in the first parameter of the constructor.
Notification.vibrate
Read only- Specifies a vibration pattern for devices with vibration hardware to emit.
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.
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. It 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
Specification | Status | Comment |
---|---|---|
Notifications API | Living Standard | Living standard |
Browser compatibility
Feature | Chrome | Firefox (Gecko) | Internet Explorer | Opera | Safari |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
Basic support | 5webkit[1] 22 |
4.0 moz[2] 22 |
No support | 25 | 6[3] |
icon |
5webkit[1] 22 |
4.0 moz[2] 22 |
No support | 25 | No support |
Available in workers | (Yes) | 41.0 (41.0) | ? | ? | ? |
silent |
43.0 | No support | No support | No support | No support |
noscreen , sticky |
No support | No support | No support | No support | No support |
sound |
No support | No support | No support | No support | No support |
renotify |
50.0 | No support | No support | No support | No support |
Promise-based Notification.requestPermission() |
46.0 | 47.0 (47.0) | ? | 40 | No support |
vibrate , actions |
53.0 | 39 | |||
badge |
53.0 | 39 |
Feature | Android | Android Webview | Firefox Mobile (Gecko) | Firefox OS | IE Mobile | Opera Mobile | Safari Mobile | Chrome for Android |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Basic support | ? |
(Yes) |
4.0moz[2] 22 |
1.0.1moz[2] 1.2 |
No support | ? | No support |
(Yes) |
icon |
? | (Yes) | 4.0moz[2] 22 |
1.0.1moz[2] 1.2 |
No support | ? | No support | (Yes) |
Available in workers | ? | (Yes) | 41.0 (41.0) | ? | ? | ? | ? | (Yes) |
silent |
No support | 43.0 | No support | No support | No support | No support | No support | 43.0 |
noscreen , sticky |
No support | No support | No support | No support | No support | No support | No support | No support |
sound |
No support | (Yes) | No support | No support | No support | No support | No support | (Yes) |
renotify |
No support | 50.0 | No support | No support | No support | No support | No support | No support |
Promise-based Notification.requestPermission() |
? | ? | 47.0 (47.0) | ? | ? | ? | ? | ? |
vibrate , actions |
No support | 53.0 | 39 | 53.0 | ||||
badge |
No support | 53.0 | 39 | 53.0 |
[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).