Doug Turner – a platform and mobile engineer with the Mozilla Corporation – has a post up discussing a new feature that may one day come to Firefox: desktop notifications.

Turner’s proposal would allow websites to display notifications to users, with their permission, of course. On first use, the website would ask for permission to show notifications, much like websites can do now with geolocation (a project Turner worked on previously).

Prior to creating his own, basic implementation, Turner reviewed two other proposals: WebNotifications and the Google Gears Notifications API. Astute readers will note that both of these specifications have been written by Google. Because of this and because of their inclusion in the now-defunct Google Gears, it’s very likely that Chrome will ship with desktop notifications at some point in the future.

The comments on his post are quite heated and some discuss a couple scenarios when websites could easily take advantage of users after they allow notifications. Regardless, the feature is very likely to move forward, given previous work by Google on the concept.

For more information, follow the bug in Bugzilla.