Zotero 5: use native notification

gagarine · March 22, 2017

Zotero is using his own notification system (floating messages) that look a bit strange.

I think it would be nicer and more robust to use native notification. Using a wrapper like https://www.npmjs.com/package/node-notifier .

dstillman · August 20, 2017

I'm not sure which notifications this was referring to, but most Zotero notifications come from the connector, not the client, so notification usage is limited by the extension APIs.

A previous version of the connector used native notifications for proxy messages, but we switched back to custom notifications because 1) on macOS native notifications are extremely limited in the text they can display, and important security-related messages about proxy hosts were being cut off, 2) again on macOS, they display the browser icon, which is kind of confusing, and 3) there's no extension-level control over sound, and notifications from Firefox make sound by default, which would make Zotero's notifications very disruptive. Zotero really has status messages and warnings more than it has notifications (which are more designed for things like incoming messages, where features like Do Not Disturb make sense), so the notification system just doesn't really work for us.

gagarine · November 26, 2017

Yes I was thinking mostly about notification when I add an entry from Firefox with the connector. I didn't know they was produced by the connector.

Thanks for this explanation.

For future reference this is the API now https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Add-ons/WebExtensions/API/notifications