Notification.onclick

The onclick property of the Notification interface specifies an event listener to receive click events. These events occur when the user clicks on a displayed Notification.

Syntax

Notification.onclick = function(event) { ... };

The default behavior is to move the focus to the viewport of the notification's related browsing context. If you don't want that behaviour, call preventDefault() on the event object.

Examples

In the following example, we use an onclick handler to open a webpage in a new tab (specified by the inclusion of the '_blank' parameter) once a notification is clicked:

notification.onclick = function(event) {
  event.preventDefault(); // prevent the browser from focusing the Notification's tab
  window.open('http://www.mozilla.org', '_blank');
}

Specifications

Specification	Status	Comment
Notifications API The definition of 'onclick' in that specification.	Recommendation	Living standard.

Browser compatibility

[1] Before Chrome 22, the support for notification followed an old prefixed version of the specification and used the navigator.webkitNotifications object to instantiate a new notification.

Before Chrome 32, Notification.permission was not supported.

Before Chrome 42, service worker additions were not supported.

Starting in Chrome 49, notifications do not work in incognito mode.

[2] Prior to Firefox 22 (Firefox OS <1.2), the instantiation of a new notification must be done with the navigator.mozNotification object through its createNotification method.

Prior to Firefox 22 (Firefox OS <1.2), the Notification was displayed when calling the show method and supported only the click and close events.

Nick Desaulniers wrote a Notification shim to cover both newer and older implementations.

One particular Firefox OS issue is that you can pass a path to an icon to use in the notification, but if the app is packaged you cannot use a relative path like /my_icon.png. You also can't use window.location.origin + "/my_icon.png" because window.location.origin is null in packaged apps. The manifest origin field fixes this, but it is only available in Firefox OS 1.1+. A potential solution for supporting Firefox OS <1.1 is to pass an absolute URL to an externally hosted version of the icon. This is less than ideal as the notification is displayed immediately without the icon, then the icon is fetched, but it works on all versions of Firefox OS.

When using notifications in a Firefox OS app, be sure to add the desktop-notification permission in your manifest file. Notifications can be used at any permission level, hosted or above: "permissions": { "desktop-notification": {} }

[3] Safari started to support notification with Safari 6, but only on Mac OSX 10.8+ (Mountain Lion).

See also

• Notification
• Using the Notifications API