Tab notifier for Firefox and SeaMonkey

Please download the last version from the Add-ons for Firefox web-site.

The following localizations are available:

  • Arabic (Ibraheem Alex)
  • Brazilian Portuguese (Marcelo Ghelman (ghelman.net))
  • Catalan (CatTranslations)
  • Dutch (markh van BabelZilla.org)
  • English
  • French (Guillaume Tuttobene)
  • German (Archaeopteryx)
  • Hebrew (baryoni)
  • Italian
  • Serbian (ДакСРБИЈА)
  • Simplified Chinese (Wang.H.K)
  • Spanish
  • Swedish (Mikael Hiort af Ornäs)
  • Taiwanese Mandarin (Meng Hao Li)

To contribute you can either donate on the add-ons page or translate it in you language with BabelZilla

52 thoughts on “Tab notifier for Firefox and SeaMonkey”

  1. Tab notifier è un’ottima estensione ma mi piacerebbe avere la possibilità di scegliere in che punto dello schermo far comparire le notifiche, non solo in alto ma anche in basso magari.

    1. La prossima versione permetterà di farlo. Inoltre consentirà di accatastare verticalmente le notifiche, in modo da non farle sovrapporre.

    2. Tab notifier 1.3, rilasciato da circa una settimana, include le nuove caratteristiche alle quali accennavo.

  2. Hello,
    I have a page where the title changes by using javascript (document.title = “abc”) and it does not work with tab-notifier. How do I have to change the title to get tab-notifier working??

    Thanks

    1. Hi. The way you change the title should be fine, but pages on a local disk (e.g. file:///home/giuseppe/test.html) are not currently allowed to show notifications. Put the file on a web server and retry (e.g. http://localhost/test.html).

      1. Hello,
        this was’nt the trick (local file or remote file). The trick was to set “window.focus()” on this page. Then tab notifier recognizes the change and shows the notification.

        Thanks!

  3. Hello,
    I’ve just another question. Is it posible to call tab-notifier by using a javascript call – without changing the Title or something??
    And if, is it possible to use newline(s) in the notification to make it “nice” btw. formatted.

    Thanks in advance
    Ronny

    1. It’s not possible with the current version but it will be possible soon (maybe in 2 weeks). The next version will expose the desktop notifications API the way Chrome does natively. I don’t think that that documentation is complete, for instance it’s not mentioned that you can also set the property replaceId of the Notification object to update a notification window already opened. On the other side, the W3C Draft is too verbose, so I suggest you to check out some examples out there to implement your solution, test it on Chrome and, when tab notifier 2.0 is ready, it will work on Firefox as well.

      As for your second question, the short answer is that shortly you will be able to show a notification made of at most twothree rows (where the first the first one or two can be a title in bold characters).
      The long answer is that most likely tab notifier 2.0 won’t support html notifications (that would allow you to insert as many newlines as you want), or to be precise it will support them in the way the W3C draft suggests (see unsupported content types), but next versions should support them. The main reason for that is that tab notifier 2.0 will be also a prototype of what I think should be built in Firefox/SeaMonkey, (and I think only small and non intrusive notifications should be allowed), but likely I’ll end up mimicking the behavior of Chrome to make users of gmail happy and this is all what users of gmail need.
      You’re welcome 🙂

  4. Hi, thank you for your add-on, it perfectly fits my needs but I have a feature request !
    Would it be possible to play a sound which comes with each notification ?
    And eventually be able to choose the sound file ?

    1. Hi, it’s in the todo list but probably I won’t work on it before June. I will take into account that there is someone that think that the feature is useful.
      Thank for the support.

  5. Hi, I think this is a great extension, but I would like to make a feature request.
    I would like to be able to change which monitor, if using a multi-monitor set up, the notifications appear.

  6. Hello, I have just started using your addon today (for Firefox) and I think it’s very good. However, an issue I appear to have come across concerns GMail desktop notifications. The first time desktop notifications are enabled for email (any mail entering the inbox) I get a notification letting me know a new mail has been received, however, every other mail that is received after the first doesn’t produce a notification. I don’t know if you’ve come across this yourself or not, but I thought I’d raise my issues with you.

    Thanks.

    1. Yes, I’m aware of this issue and I found out the reason, which is related to this bug of Mozilla browsers. This is also the reason why the notification doesn’t close (unlike what happens in Chrome, where, strangely enough, mail notifications are closed automatically after few seconds and chat notifications are not). Since I don’t know when the bug will be fixed, I’m looking for a workaround, meanwhile you can use this version. Using it with Firefox 15 or 16 you’ll see a deprecation error in the Error Console mentioning __exposedProps__, while it doesn’t work with Firefox 17 and newer versions. Please note that chat notifications in Gmail are not affected by the problem.
      Update 30/11/2012: the problem is fixed with the ver. 2.11.
      Thanks for reporting the issue.

      1. Hi, I am using tab notifier 2.11 with FF nightly, but the notifications don’t disappear, in fact they stay on the screen forever, I can’t even close it with the ‘x’ in the upper right corner. Is this a known issue?

  7. Hello,
    first I wanna thank you for this great addon!
    It’s great how much it is customizable and that it provides vertically stacked notifications.

    I’d like to see an option set custom defined timeout durations for notifications to override the default ones from the websites.
    Do you think this is possible?

    Thank you

    1. This feature would be really useful (in fact the behaviour of some websites doesn’t make sense – e.g. for gmail chat messages stay forever and emails disappear immediately – ) but I can’t predict when I have time to go back to this project. I’ll keep you posted, also if I create project on google code or similar, (if you know someone that would like to contribute I will do it soon)

  8. Hello,
    Can you please let me know if you have incorporated a sound alert in your latest version per an earlier request.
    Thanks

  9. Ciao, tab notifier è una fantastica estensione, ma io uso alcune webapp come facebook in thunderbird e mi farebbe davvero comodo averla anche li.
    Ci sarebbe la possibilità di fare un porting anche per thunderbird?
    🙂

  10. how to build a url notifier
    if the url(content of address bar changes it should show the notification)
    suppose u entered http://www.google.com in a new tab it should show “hello now u r on google.com”

  11. Hi aranor,
    I’m trying to get the Tab Notifier working in FF on Linux Mint. When I try a test notification it works, but it does not show up for a new email. I enabled notifications in gmail settings, tried to disable all other extensions, reinstalled Tab notifier but w/o success. Do you have any idea how I can continue with troubleshooting, please?

    1. Make sure that “Always disabled (for web pages and add-ons)” in “Default settings” is not checked. That is an evil option whose effects are not visible from the “domain exceptions” window. If you don’t sort it out tell me if it works with other sites, for instance try it with http://unusoft.it/extensions/webNot.html and tell me if the Error Console of Firefox shows any error. Tell me also what version of Firefox you are using.

      1. Having trouble with 2.1.3, FF 23, and just about any site I can find that uses the webkit api. GMail and GCalendar recognize that the webkit notifications are available, but they never show. I tried mucking with the test code on http://code.google.com/p/ff-html5notifications/ and that doesn’t work either. I get lots of errors in the error console about permission denied to property ‘show’. The test code there is in an iframe. If I show only the iframe, it requests permission for a different site, and works. But when I go back to the “main” page, it doesn’t work. I’ve tried setting the default permission for popups to allow, that doesn’t help.

        The test site you mention *does* work.

        I’m guessing that maybe gmail/gcal use iframes too, and that is part of the problem?

        1. Thanks, I’m quoting your last message of our emails exchange as it can be useful for someone:

          I’ve noticed that gmail now supports firefox’s native notification system, so tab notifier is only needed for google calendar for me at the moment.

          What I’ve ended up doing to make that work is to set the default policy for the notifications to be allowed, and then it works fine, that seems to work around the iframe problem. Not the best way to do things, but I’ve not found sites abusing the notification system thus far, so it works for now.

  12. With a little more polish, this would be an absolute must-have extension.
    The biggest improvement would be to automatically dismiss the notification after the “filter on title” expression disappears for whatever reason. One example would be Facebook’s messenger web interface. I set a regular expression “messaged you”. I am aware the title switches back and forth, but once the message is read on e.g. mobile device, the title no longer says “messaged you”, but the notification stays.
    I really hope this extension isn’t abandoned, as it has a lot of potential… last update June 10, 2013

  13. It would be great if there could be a toolbar-button to enable/disable all notifications on a temporary basis. Sometimes you want to be able to “mute” all notifications when you’re working on something, and then later turn them back on.

  14. Can someone please help me out? How do I set this up so I get Twitter desktop notifications?

  15. I have the most recent version of this addon and it stopped working when I updated to Firefox Dev edition/Aurora (40.0a2) from 39.

  16. Hi there I am a huge fan of your addon. I am also an addon developer. I am making an addon called NativeShot, it takes native screenshot of all monitors and then overlays one huge chromeless window with attribute alwaysRaised and then draws the screenshot to canvas in this window. So then users will crop and click copy to clipboard/upload to [img hosting service here]/save to disk.

    Here’s my addon: https://github.com/Noitidart/NativeShot

    Basically like this addon: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/lightshot/ but this guy uses binary file and gets his window on top of everyones. I was trying to do it without binary if possible, if not ill go binary/jsctypes.

    But would it be possible for me to get my window over your windows? This is my window opening code: https://github.com/Noitidart/NativeShot/blob/master/bootstrap.js#L156

    Thanks so much for your awesome work!

  17. I also just tested your addon on Ubuntu (for linux test) and it is awesome, your notification windows are on top of my window screenshot:

    http://i.imgur.com/5nkCQDh.png

    If you could share with me how to get my window over yours i would be very greatful.

    Also I noticed your windows don’t overlay the ubuntu unity dock/taskbar at left, is there anyway to make it overlay that? Im trying to get my window to overlay it but can’t figure it out.

    1. Hi. You may hack Firefox notifications the way Tab Notifier does (but probably you’ve already got to this point). Pass some specific data with the cookie parameter of showAlertNotification, create an overlay for “chrome://global/content/alerts/alert.xul” and by javascript you can distinguish your windows checking the cookie that you passed (that will be in gAlertCookie), alter those and leave alone the rest. New notifications will be on top of your window anyway, I don’t know any trick to change this, anyway you could keep track of all notification windows (Tab Notifier’s and regular ones) and when you need it you can close them all (but that starts to be a bit overkilling), and as for covering the dock/taskbar I’m afraid I don’t know any js-ctypes-free solutions. I hope this helps.

      1. Thank you so much for your reply! Actualy js-ctypes solutions would be very welcome, do you have any you can share? even just direction would be very nice.

        I managed to get my window to cover your tab notifications, i used x11 XSendEvent for atom of _NET_WM_ABOVE so its always on top of everything while showing 🙂

  18. Our company recently updated to Firefox 38.3 ESR (from 31.8) and I’ve found the behaviour of the notifications has changed.

    Where before the notifications appeared on the stock light background and required manual dismissal, they are now the dark, flat, rounded style and self-dismiss after 5 seconds. The preference settings have no effect, so I’m unable to get the old behaviour back. Is there something I can do to get the preference settings to work in 38.3?

    This is under CentOS 6.4 using the latest release of tab notifier.

    Cheers.

  19. Ciao,
    ho provato la tua estensione Tab Notifier, che mi sarebbe molto utile, soprattutto per quelle app/siti che insistono a NON implementare le notifiche con le modalità esposte da Firefox.
    Un esempio è MightyText.
    Sfortunatamente le notifiche vengono mostrate solo ogni tanto. Anzi, a dire la verità fin’ora sono riuscito a vederle solo usando la funzione di test nel pannello di configurazione, mentre non le ho mai viste comparire nel normale uso di Firefox.
    Anche la funzione test del pannello di configurazione mostra le notifiche solo ogni tanto, non capisco come mai.
    Uso Firefox 41.0.2 su OpenSUSE Tumbleweed.

  20. Hi. I’m using tab notifier for FireFox. I think it’s great. I’d like to suggest mor customization options, so you can make it look exactly like de Windos 10 notifications or make more easy the way to cutomize the appearence of the tabs. I men, I can’t find the way to change the close buttons or the font of the notiications, or make it bold, italics or underlined. Also, the corners of the notifications all look rounded, no matter if I deactivate this options.
    Keep the good work.

  21. Tab notifier v 3.0 – Does it work in FF v50? Rated 3 out of 5 stars
    This extension would be very useful if it works well – and if can be customized for the sites/pages I would only want to be notified .
    I installed it and it does not work in my FF 50.1.0 win8.1:
    1. I do not see any options/setings like in the older version.
    2. I do not see any messages
    3. I do not see any icon – maybe I am not supposed to…
    4. there is no parameter tabnotifier in about:config
    I re-installed it a couple of times (with FF restart) – same ;-(
    I see it works for others…what do I have wrong?

  22. Update:
    After re-install 3rd time I get messages – but I have:
    NO add-on icon, NO disable button on the message (so I cannot disable a page notifing me) and NO options to change (in add-on page). What is ti wrong? I use NoScript – does it interfere?
    Thank for any help!

    1. The extension needed to be made again from scratch as result of deep changes in Firefox.
      The version 3.1 reintroduces default and per-domain settings.
      Please be aware that currently it’s not technically possible to implement some settings like notifications position and aspect or persistent windows, but I’ll monitor the evolution of the web extension api to see how I can use it to its best.

    1. Yes, thanks for the suggestion. I’ve been to busy to think about his project in the last years (and also to monitor the changes to the WebExtensions API) but that may change in on-two months 🙂

      1. Thanks you for your great Addon 🙂
        It would be really really useful to add somehow the change suggested by Samuel Plentz so that notifications stay open if I toggle a setting in about:config
        I am also a developer so I can help if needed.
        Thank you for all your effort!

  23. Thank you Signore!

    Does anyone know of an addon (newer and actively maintained) with the same functionality for Firefox?

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