I’ve been hearing that Google’s introduced a desktop notification system in Gmail where if you get a new chat or a new email, a little window pops up. Sounds cool, and I do sometimes miss timely messages because I’m not paying attention, so how do I download it and install it into my PC or Web browser?
The great news is that there’s nothing to download or install: it’s built in to Gmail itself so as long as you have a Google Gmail account, you should now be able to enable it and have it help you ensure you don’t miss important messages. However… yeah, and there’s often a however, right… there are some Web browsers that aren’t compatible with the Gmail desktop notifications window code, notably Apple’s Safari browser.
Before we talk about that and some of the alternatives you have if you are a Safari fan, let’s have a quick peek at how to enable Gmail Desktop Notifications!
If you’re lucky, next time you go to Gmail, you’ll find that it has a little yellow window inviting you to enable the notification system, kinda hard to miss:
Easily done: Click on “Click here to enable” and your browser should confirm that you’re wanting to grant this permission to the app and… you’re done!
If that’s not present, you can check your Gmail settings by going to “Settings” on the top right:
Then scroll down about halfway on this long page of settings, where you’ll see a new section for “Desktop Notifications”:
Once it’s enabled, here’s the kind of thing you can expect to see on your computer desktop (yes, outside of the Web browser. Think Google Chrome OS) when a new message comes in:
Similar notifications pop up for chats. It’s important to realize that you are going to really need to get comfortable with tabs: if Gmail isn’t running in one of the tabs or windows of your compatible Web browser, you won’t get notifications. One possible solution is to launch a window in your browser just for Gmail, then minimize it on your Dock/Toolbar.
And if you’re in Safari or another browser that doesn’t play well with the new code? Here’s what you’ll see:
Ah well. The good news is that there are some cool alternative Gmail notification utilities for Safari, my favorite of which is Gmail Counter, a simple extension that doesn’t pop up a separate window, but makes it pretty hard to miss new Gmail messages as they arrive. Really dying for pop-ups? On the Mac I recommend Notify, a little menubar utility that pops up a little window when new mail arrives on Gmail.
Thanks for sharing how to do it. I’ve always been so confused how to do it, glad I found your post.