Re: making page visibility a property of document instead of top level browsing context

I continue to think that we should make the document visibility state
be affected by display:none on parent <iframe>s.

And using a separate API to measure
visibility-honoring-display-none-iframes from
visibility-of-topmost-document seems confusing at best. It seems
likewise confusing and error prone to rely on that people will
remember to measure visibility of an element rather than the document.

So I definitely think we should make document.visibilityState be
"hidden" if any parent iframes are display:none. It seems like the
best way to improve performance of the web.

While there is a risk that it will break existing content, the risk
seems fairly small.

Obviously that's easy for me to say since I wouldn't be the one
attempting such an change. Hence, if it's really the case that no
browser is willing to be first to change behavior here then we'll have
to live with confusing and less-performant options.

/ Jonas

On Mon, Jan 27, 2014 at 4:57 PM, Jatinder Mann <jmann@microsoft.com> wrote:
> Again, I don't think we should make that particular change, so it's probably not necessary to get that data. I do think we should focus on trying to solve Element Visibility. I'll make sure we include it on the agenda for this week's conference call discussion. It'd be great if you could join us!
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Boris Zbarsky [mailto:bzbarsky@MIT.EDU]
> Sent: Monday, January 27, 2014 4:45 PM
> To: Jatinder Mann; Arvind Jain
> Cc: Ojan Vafai; Jonas Sicking; public-web-perf@w3.org
> Subject: Re: making page visibility a property of document instead of top level browsing context
>
> On 1/27/14 4:42 PM, Jatinder Mann wrote:
>> Yes, a change in behavior can be described as breaking compatibility.
>
> Yes.  That's the definition of "breaking compatibility"...
>
>> It’s really an example of a change in behavior that would generally be more beneficial (e.g., power savings) than hurtful (e.g., don’t expect applications are relying on that behavior).
>
> In other words, you think the compatibility impact is small.  That's a fine thing to think, especially if you have data to back it up.  We need such data here.
>
> -Boris

Received on Tuesday, 28 January 2014 02:31:47 UTC