For people with newer versions of Chrome or Firefox (other browsers may support it in the future), you should now be able to go to your settings and enable push notifications for your device. Enabling web push notifications will allow you to get mobile app-type alerts whenever someone sends you a private message, posts a message to your wall, get a comment on your story or blog, find out the second someone beats your bid on the calendar, obtain a new subscriber, etc. Click on the "Enable Push Notifications" button (get to it through your profile settings) then allow the action on your desktop or phone and you shouldn't need to have Asianfanfics open in a browser anymore to get your alerts. Push notifications also adhere to your notification preferences (the link under "Set Up Push Notifications") so that you don't get the alerts you don't want.

This feature had actually been up for a few days now but it needed a lot of testing before I made any sort of announcement (thanks to those of you who helped with the beta testing!). I've also added additional options under the notification preferences section to allow for finer-grained control over which notifications you want to see.

Please note that the new push notifications are different from the instant notifications option. First, instant notifications are well... instant. The new push notifications can only be sent out once a minute. Also, instant notifications will always be sent out whereas push notifications will take its time and will not show if you've already seen the alert on the site. Lastly, as I've mentioned, push notifications are only supported in newer versions of only a handful of browsers: Firefox 50+, Desktop Chrome 51+, Android Chrome 55+, and I think full-fledged Opera 42+ (not Opera Mini). I'm not even sure if it works on iOS at all (Update: it's been confirmed that it doesn't). On the other hand, instant notifications should be supported in any browser on any device.

Anyway, I know there are only a few of you who can take advantage of this new feature but I figured it's better to at least give it to you now instead of having to wait that much longer for it. Hope you find it useful.