Send desktop notifications in Chrome or Firefox from a closed web app?
You can send push notifications even when your web page is not active using Service Workers, the Notification API for service workers and the push API for server-initiated notifications (or scheduled notifications).
As of June 2016, Service Workers are supported in Chrome, Firefox and Opera. See the status at https://jakearchibald.github.io/isserviceworkerready/
See the following links for related discussions, status of implementation and specifications.
- Service workers are enabled by default since Chrome 40, Firefox 33, and Opera 24. See the HTML5Rocks tutorial and MDN.
- Push notifications: Chrome 42+, Firefox 44+
You can do exactly what you are looking for using the W3C Push API.
If you want to build everything from scratch I suggest to start reading this tutorial by Google. It is for Chrome, but Firefox works in a very similar way.
However it's a lot of work and the "standard" is still evolving: I suggest that you use a service like Pushpad (I am the founder).