@rickmb Thanks. Not natively supported by Firefox is bad. However, at least the firefox user can install the extension to make it work. IE is another story. I hope it can be supported in later version of IE 10.
Those two specs are not competing. Both Chrome and Safari supports both. But the implementation of FF extension is based on the old spec and that's why I say it's better to stick in old spec now to give users the consistent user experience.
Although I never saw gmail has the popup notification, but I really hope when I closed the browser, it somehow still will popup the notification, that will be super crazy.
I am not sure if OSX support web server push notification to the "Notification center" because, iOS is doing so.
Web Notification is only available when you have page opened.
There are many solutions of pubsub in web server, such as push notification in iOS. So once your web server can push messages to the client, you can send the notification to 'Notification Center'.
Google Chrome has added an option lately to keep running after you close the browser window. The option is called "Continue running background apps when Google Chrome is closed." If you click the wrench icon, there would be an option to View Background Pages.
@sp332 Thanks for the info. Yup, if you install the offline Gmail, it will still check in the background when Chrome is closed. This background feature is only available to Chrome apps or extensions but not to the web pages.
I'd say, no, it's not time to integrate web notifications.
Especially if you want a consistent user experience across browsers.
Nice informative writeup on the current state though.