One of the first extensions to make use of these system-wide notifications is the popular Gmail Notifier add-on for Chrome. After installing the extension, you will receive a notification whenever a new email arrives in your inbox. The advantage of this system is that you will see this notification, even if you are not looking at your browser.

Some users will surely complain that OSX and Linux already have perfectly good system-wide notifications systems. This new notifications API, however, allows developers to create their extensions without having to think about the desktop platform and Google's own developers won't have to interface with multiple third-party desktop notifications platforms either. Chances are that we will see a variation of these desktop notifications in Google's Chrome OS as well.