Nnnotifier

No Native Notifications for Firefox

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/no-native-notifications/

Firefox allows web pages and addons to create desktop notifications. When desktop notifications were introduced, the notifications were implemented using XUL. This gives Firefox maximal control over how desktop notifications are displayed.

Later, Firefox started integrating the desktop notifications in the native platform-dependent notification manager. E.g. starting with Firefox 36 on Linux, libnotify is used.

Disabling native notifications on Firefox

Preference

As of Firefox 59, native notifications can be disabled by setting the alerts.useSystemBackend preference to false at about:config (see bug 1418287).

For previous versions, the method depends on the operating system.

macOS

• Firefox 59 and later (recommended): see the above preference.
• Firefox 57 and later: install No Native Notifications 0.2.
• Firefox 56 and earlier: install No Native Notifications 0.1.

Linux

• Firefox 59 and later: see the above preference.
• Firefox 57 and 58: cannot be disabled by an add-on.
• Firefox 56 and earlier: install No Native Notifications 0.1.

Firefox 57 has dropped support for legacy add-ons and there is no work-around to disable native notifications through an add-on. To disable native notifications on Linux, the libnotify.so.4 library needs to be disabled. For example by starting Firefox as follows:

#!/bin/sh
DIRNAME=$(mktemp -d)
touch "${DIRNAME}/libnotify.so.4"
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH="${DIRNAME}"
/usr/bin/firefox "$@"
rm -rf "${DIRNAME}"

Windows

Firefox does not support native notifications on Windows, so you do not have to install anything to disable it. In case native notifications become supported (e.g. due to bug 1155505), then the above preference can be used to disable it.