Proposal: Allow notifications API in content scripts

[erosman]

Preamble

Content scripts often need to show a notification. At the moment, the process involves adding a listener in the background script and then sending a message to the background script to generate the notifications.create().

Notification API should be a safe enough API to be allowed in the Content Script WebExtension APIs.

Proposal

Allow notifications in the Content Script WebExtension APIs

Purpose

Reduce reliance on the background script/service-worker/event-page
See also: #378, #403

[zombie]

After a short discussion in the meeting, we decided against this proposal. Overall we believe in keeping the API surface of content scripts to a minimum, except when there's a strong use case that is better solved by exposing a specific API to that environment.

Sending a message to the background and (potentially) waking up the event page/service worker doesn't seem too burdensome, and the API is already asynchronous and "global" (not tied to a particular page where a content script is executing), so keeping the current state seems consistent with the API design and intended use.

Also note the regular web notifications DOM api is available to content scripts, and provides yet another potential option for extensions.