Google has just launched desktop notifications for Gmail using HTML5 technology. Of course, they’ve had a separate pop-up notifier for quite a while now. How does this one compare?
Improvements:
- Will run on any operating system.
- Doesn’t need to be installed on your computer.
- Doesn’t require a registry hack now that GMail requires SSL on everything.
- Doesn’t require you to enter your login & password in a separate app.
- Lets you choose between only chat notifications, only email notifications, or both.
- If you use Priority Inbox, lets you choose between all new messages or only those PI has marked as Important.
Downside:
- Needs Gmail to be open. No biggie, as this is true of pop-up notifications for Outlook, Thunderbird, etc. But since the old notifier was a separate app, it could run on its own.
- Only works with Chrome so far.
