Extension support has remained one of Google Chrome’s strengths’. Despite its recent launch, Chrome has 5,000 of them and they are set to become even more powerful. Now, extensions for Google Chrome 5 can send out desktop notifications. With this, you no longer need to have your browser on the screen to know when sites need to notify you of actions. This will aid developers with more space to work, when compared to the few pixels they get in the toolbar. This also allows users to minimize Chrome, but still keep track of what is going on in their browser windows.

Take for example, the Gmail Notifier extension, an early adopter of notifications, which lets you see the email notification even if you are not looking at the email browser.

Up until now, websites could deliver non-model messages with the notifications API, first introduced in Chrome 4 for Windows. However, extension developers can now use the desktop notifications API to deliver notifications appearing out of the browser window too. OSX and Linux are equipped with system-wide notifications systems already, but the new notifications API will let developers create extensions without thinking about the desktop platform. Google’s own developers won’t be required to interface with third-party desktop notifications platforms too.

Prior to this, Chrome users were notified of updates by way of estension was by badging an extension icon.