Google Notifier

~ the eulogy ~

Two programs went by this name, which is part of why nobody remembers it clearly. On Windows it was Gmail Notifier. On the Mac it was Google Notifier, and it watched your calendar as well as your mail. Both did the same small thing: they sat in the system tray or the menu bar, asked Gmail every few minutes whether anything new had arrived, and raised a little alert when the answer was yes.

It existed because in 2005 the browser was not a place you could be notified from. A tab had no way to reach out and tap you on the shoulder. Webmail had replaced the mail client for a lot of people without replacing the one feature the mail client was actually good at, which was telling you to come back. Google's answer was to ship a tiny native program that bridged a web service to an operating system with no concept of the web in it. The program polled. That was the whole architecture.

Around 2006 the tray on a student machine in Turkey belonged to MSN Messenger, and webmail here still mostly meant Hotmail or Yahoo. Gmail arrived on invitations and felt like a different class of object, something you were let into. A program whose entire purpose was watching a Gmail inbox assumed your mail had already finished moving there. That assumption needed a few more years to be true where I was sitting.

~ the dossier ~

~ what it actually did ~

The alert was the headline feature and the better one was buried. Google Notifier could register itself as your system's default mail handler, which meant a mailto: link anywhere on your computer would open a Gmail compose window rather than launching Outlook Express at you. For anyone whose mail had moved to the browser but whose operating system had not noticed, this was the fix.

The Mac build went further and polled Google Calendar too, popping reminders for events. It is a strange historical detail that the Mac version of a Google desktop utility was the more capable one.

~ the day it died ~

The notice went up on 16 January 2014 and gave users fifteen days. Google's stated reason was almost gentle about it: smartphones now notify us of new messages wherever we are, and improvements to web technology let the same features be built straight into the browser. Both halves of that were true, and together they described a program with nothing left to do.

The suggested replacements were a Chrome app called Gmail Checker, or simply switching on desktop notifications inside Gmail's own settings. Schemer, Google's goal-sharing experiment, was switched off in the same announcement.

~ what took over the job ~

Every website that asks permission to send you notifications is doing what this program did, from inside the page, without an install. The Notification API landed in browsers in the early 2010s and turned a category of small native utilities into a checkbox. Gmail Notifier was the clearest casualty because its function was the narrowest.

What got lost in the handover was the default mail handler trick. A web app still cannot quietly make itself the thing your computer opens when you click an address, and the little program that could do that has been gone since 2014.

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