Back in my dev days we used AJAX (I think) to load stuff in the background before the user actually performed the behavior.
Just a suggestion here but it would be cool (and speed things up thus positive UX) if the notifications (and messages too) would load in the background before the user initiated the click of the notifications and messaging buttons.
Thus... not having to wait 1 millisecond for it to load (I know I know first world problems).