Classic 'new message' notifications about your talk page or LQT only show up when refreshing a page.
Polling the web API every couple minutes could be nice, especially if things like RecentChanges turn into more interactive pages that will be long-running.
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Alternatively, a non-polling implementation (real-time) could use something like [Server-Sent Events](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Server-sent_events/Using_server-sent_events) ([browser support](http://caniuse.com/eventsource)) or [WebSockets](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/WebSockets) ([browser support](http://caniuse.com/#feat=websockets)) with [COMET](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comet_%28programming%29) fallback and such. There are libraries that handle some of the browser compatibility issues with these.
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**Version**: unspecified
**Severity**: enhancement