Re: [w3c/manifest] Proposal: Display Mode 'standalone-no-ui' (#659)

Thanks to both of you for taking the time to look through the proposal and provide your thoughts. I have provided my thoughts on your main points below.

@marcoscaceres The basic rationale is to afford designers as much control over design as possible. This seems to be valued a lot, with many native desktop applications choosing to provide their own window top.

This is probably because it makes them look better. To start with, the default OS design has a generic feel to it, by its very nature, and apps want to have their own design identity which stands out. Additionally, the default OS design can easily look discordant with the design of the rest of the app.

Indeed, even browsers do this. For instance, the new Firefox design is very tight to the window top, with tabs sharing the same ‘horizontal level’ as the window controls. Chrome is somewhat less tight, but still uses part of the area which is inaccessible to PWAs without `standalone-no-ui`.

Selecting a theme colour can help with this to some extent, but some apps have more complex designs, like background gradients, images, or even videos and graphics. Plus, designers might want more than thematic consistency: they might also want to use the window top real estate for certain elements of functionality, such as a notification indicator.

@kenchris I hope I addressed user safety concerns in [this comment](https://github.com/w3c/manifest/issues/659#issuecomment-372117278). If there's something I missed, please let me know.

Concerning platform differences, I agree that this feature would not be suitable on mobile. My hope was that `standalone-no-ui` would function as `standalone` on all mobile platforms (Android, iOS). This feature is only really useful for desktop platforms, like Windows. In those cases, this feature seems reasonable to me, simply given that it is so common to see this with native desktop applications. In simple terms, if it's good for native apps, can it not be good for web apps? And as I've said before, it really is a very common phenomenon among desktop applications.

My understanding is that part of the rationale behind the Manifest and the `display` property in particular is to make Web apps appear almost indistinguishable from native apps in a lot of cases. On mobile, the Manifest does this very well. However, unfortunately, on desktop, Web apps still look like second class citizens, because, unlike their native counterparts, they cannot control what appears in their window top.

I understand that a feature like this does entail complexity: a JavaScript API for window control, perhaps new CSS functionality for detecting the context in which the Web app is being run, user safety functionality, and a way to distinguish between mobile and desktop environments. However, without this feature, Web apps, in their appearance, will still be second class citizens in comparison to their native counterparts. I would hope that we can find a way to change this.

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