firefoxnotify-osdthunderbird
Firefox has been the default browser for ages. Thunderbird is a very popular e-mail client under consideration for being included as default in the future. Notify OSD has been around for years now.
What went wrong that in that long timeframe such important applications do not have such an important and visible feature implemented? This is very inconsistent. When will we see it integrated?
Your best bet would be file a bug and ask for the feature. When filing a wishlist bug like this, be sure to give some thought out user cases why this feature could prove to be useful for a larger section of the Ubuntu user community.
Yeah: Chromify-OSD.
This can be installed from the Google Chrome Web Store.
To install it, just go to the webstore and click the "Add to Chrome" button - it'll do the rest.
To use it, you'll probably need to restart Chrome, at that point it should be working.
All bugs should be reported to the launchpad.net project page - for more on reporting bugs, take a look at this question: How do I report a bug?
Best Answer
I just want to clarify something - notify-osd is just one implementation of the Freedesktop Notification spec. Applications actually use libnotify, which allows them to integrate with the notification system (which could be notify-osd, the legacy notification-daemon or any other implementation of the spec)
Both Thunderbird and Firefox already have native support for libnotify. However, they fall back to XUL notifications when communicating with a notification system which doesn't support actions (ie, notify-osd). This is because the types of notifications provided by Firefox and Thunderbird show information that is only really useful if the actual notification allows the user to interact with it (eg, "download finished" should provide a way for the user to access the downloaded file. A "new mail" notification should provide a way to access the new mail, and be persistent).
Making Thunderbird and Firefox use libnotify when the notification system doesn't support actions would provide a very sub-optimal experience if we made no other UI changes.
There is already ongoing work to integrate Thunderbird in to the messaging menu. Part of this will involve having new-mail alerts via notify-osd. Persistence will be provided by the messaging menu.
In addition to this, I will at some point start work on integrating download notifications in Firefox with notify-osd and the Unity launcher (with the launcher being able to show a progressbar, and use quicklists as a way to access finished downloads). This work hasn't started yet and will be something I do for the 11.10 cycle.