Firefox/Push Notifications

Overview

Push notifications is a a collection of features, webAPIs, and servers enabling web applications to efficiently notify client browsers of an event. Ideal use cases are a messaging, email, calendar, and games.

High Level Design

Push Notification contains the following technologies:

Notification API

WebAPI landed in Fx22. Can be used without push and service workers, but will be a popular use case.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/notification

Service Workers

Service workers is the ability for your browser to run a script in the background enabling offline applications, background processing, and push notifications.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/ServiceWorker

Push WebAPI

Web DOM API that enables a website to subscribe a client, upon granting permission, to send events to the client.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Push_API

Push Server

Mozilla hosted server that brokers the registration and sending of push events from web app servers to clients. Past terms for this include: SimplePush and WebPush which distinguished low level design and protocol support. For web developers, the server architecture may migrate when appropriate, but the WebAPI will remain the same.

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Services/SimplePushServer

http://autopush.readthedocs.org/en/latest/api.html

Mobile

Mobile is targeting Fx43 to support. Android and iOS will use leverage Google Cloud Messaging (GCM) and Apple Push Notification Services(APNS) respectively.

Product

• Initial draft of user stories - https://etherpad.mozilla.org/push-notifications

Milestones

M1: Targeting Fx42

• Initial implementation of Push WebAPI
• Currently no changes to the existing Notification UI
  • Fx42 Notification UI uplifts requested for improved user control exposed due to the Push WebAPI
  • bug tree TBA
• Supports service workers, enabling push events when all tabs are closed.
• Support for Android or iOS in M2
• Push event contains no data at this time.

M1.1: Server side policies for large scale usage.

M2: Fx43/44

• Improved Notification management and user control features.

Future

• Use HTTP2 to conform to W3C WebPush spec.

TEAM / RACI

Server

• Dev: Ben Bangert, JR Conlin, Kit Cambridge, Ian Bicking (mgr)

Platform

• Dev: Martin Thompson, Doug Turner(mgr), Nikhil Marathe

Desktop

• ckarlof is finding dev person

UX

• Philipp Sackl

General

• Approvers: Dave Camp, Doug Turner, Nick Nguyen
• Product: Bill Maggs, Karen R.
• Technical Program Manager: Edwin Wong

Communications

email: dev-push@mozilla.org - https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-push irc: #push - IRC info mtgs: Wed - 11AM PDT - Vidyo:Services

Demos and Testing

Requires Firefox 42 or later

• http://johnme-gcm.appspot.com/
• https://simple-push-demo.appspot.com/
• http://edmoz.github.io/push-notification-test/