A suggested new permission: opening pop-up windows

In the early days of JavaScript-enabled websites, the window.open() API
had a lot of options that gave websites control over the appearance of
the resulting window, including things like "make a window without
browser chrome" or "make a window that's full-screen by default". These
APIs were very quickly abused on the public Internet, and these days
most browsers silently ignore requests to open pop-up windows, or just
open new tabs instead.

However, the use-cases for these options are still present. A web-based
presentation program would ideally be able to open a full-screen window
for displaying the presentation, while the original window display the
presenter's notes (or whatever). Web-based games, too, would no doubt
benefit from having programmatic access to full-screen windows.

If there's a way for an application to open a full-screen window, it
would also be good if there was an application to retrieve information
about the logical layout of display devices attached to the computer, to
present the use with a choice of *which* display gets the full-screen
window, and to remember that choice for later.

I'm not sure whether there should be a permission for "unfettered access
to window.open()" or perhaps a permission for each option to that
function, but I think that having some way for users to grant such
permissions to a web application would be a Good Thing.


Tim Allen

Received on Friday, 10 December 2010 11:02:32 UTC