Mavericks Notifications & Gmail

In Mavericks is there a way to use the notifications tray (not just a notification pop-up) for Gmail without using the Mail app?

There are third-party apps for this notifications feature, but here I thought Mavericks would make gmail notifications native, at least through Safari. I know Safari can use the notifications tray even when it is closed, but I can only sometimes get a Gmail notification that way. And even then, Mac only displays an alert. It does not stay in the notifications tray.

I usually just keep Mail running with the window closed. Whenever I get mail I get a 'ding' and a notice.
It only stays in the pop-out tray until I check mail.

You can cobble together a solution for this as I did when notifications were introduced. I setup cron to check GMail every ten minutes through a Python script and if there were unread emails in my inbox, I had terminal-notifier create a notification. That's likely a little convoluted and involves some knowledge of more advanced techniques so if what I just said looks like a foreign language to you, ignore it.

You may want to see if Safari has a check GMail extension. There's one here but unfortunately, it doesn't look like it creates notifications.

As for the notifications in Safari, they can be triggered from websites but they have to be coded by the website developers. Apple has thus made the functionality possible but it's up to developers to build it in (that's what I gather from what I've read).