21

The problem

I have the Chrome notifications popping up in the lower left corner of my main screen. This is quite annoying, 'cause the cursor of my terminal windows are right there, and they cover completly the command line.

I'm on Ubuntu 14.04 and Chrome 42

I've already tried:

  • making my secondary (on the right) screen as primary: it still display notifications on the lower left angle of my left monitor
  • Activate Chrome native notifications
    • Libnotify Notifications in Chrome doesn't work, even with the modifications proposed by the accepted answer
    • Linux Native Notification is incompatible, needs Unity plugin (what's that???)
    • Chromify-OSD requires NPAPI, that I can't install, it's deprecated

Question

What can I try? I will accept any of those solutions:

  • redirect the notifications to Unity
  • move them in an other angle of my screen
  • move to an other monitor (I'm using Chrome on the secondary monitor)

Also...

I also found this on Chromium FAQs:

Q. Why don't Chromium notifications use the D-BUS-based notifications system (aka libnotify / notification-daemon)?

A1. HTML5 notifications can contain arbitrary HTML, which is not supported by the notification protocol. (This is the same reason we don't use Growl on OS X.)

A2. Chromium's notifications include a button that brings up an options menu, which is also not supported by the notification protocol.

A3. The glitzy Ubuntu notifications daemon, by design, does not allow the user to interact with notifications at all, which doesn't work when the notification HTML includes clickable links.

A4. It would be nice to extend the protocol to allow Chromium to integrate. Any takers?

1
  • There is a bug opened in chromium bug database dated from 2013 and not much activity there
    – solsTiCe
    May 8, 2015 at 22:54

3 Answers 3

3

So here's the problem. Like you mentioned, NPAPI is on its way out and Webkit applications are going to make heavy use of their own in-built notification system instead of respecting the one provided by a desktop environment [1]. Unless someone comes up with a way with intercepting the notification requests for the browser and have it to speak at a local daemon that can in turn speak with notify-osd; we're out of luck.

Expanding on this, KDE allows for button manipulation in its notification service whereas Ubuntu does not. If they've unified this one action as a generic feature, it might be even more feasible to implement the above. But alas.

[1]: More likely, they want to make it as rich as possible but without worrying too much about cross platform support.

7
  • The Libnotify Notifications Chrome Extension had a daemon that did that, but it doesn't work anymore. It was in my question... May 12, 2015 at 8:09
  • The daemon you seem to refer to in your question is from the content on the Chrome Developer's page that refers to the notification daemon of the system, not the one provided by chrome-notify-osd. May 12, 2015 at 12:10
  • What's chrome-notify-osd? What are you referring to? May 12, 2015 at 13:19
  • Ah, that was quick typing, I meant just notify-osd. May 12, 2015 at 19:26
  • Ah right. But the daemon provided by the extension should redirect the notification to the notify-ost one... Or did I understood that wrong? May 13, 2015 at 8:44
1

Have you tried this?

Step 1: install patched libnotify

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:leolik/leolik 
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade
sudo apt-get install libnotify-bin
pkill notify-osd

Step2: Install config utility

1
  • 5
    This patched version is to modify the system notifications. I want to change Chrome's, or alternatively to redirect them to system's. This doesn't answer my question. May 11, 2015 at 21:50
0

Rather than waiting for Chrome to move to system notifications, I decided a temporary hack was in order. This looks for the popop and moves it. I run it once a minute from cron. This is, of course, *nix only.

https://github.com/tonyaiuto/settings/tree/master/move_chrome_notify

The basic idea is - enumerate all children of the root window (xwininfo) - look for the one at a specific position from the bottom right corner - move (and resize) it with xdotool

YMMV: The default X position to move to is almost certainly wrong for everyone but me.

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