[whatwg] Proposal for IsSearchProviderInstalled / AddSearchProvider

On Fri, Dec 16, 2011 at 3:08 PM, Peter Kasting <pkasting at google.com> wrote:

> >
> > On Tue, 17 May 2011, Bjartur Thorlacius wrote:
> > > Then why add an API when we've already got (IMO superior) declarative
> > > markup?
> >
> > In the case of adding the API to the spec, because it's already
> > implemented. As to why it was added to the browsers, no idea.
>
>
> Certainly there's no declarative markup for IsSearchProviderInstalled().
>  As for AddSearchProvider(), I know one reason it was added to Chrome was
> explicitly to expose the "and make default" functionality.  Of course one
> could argue that a UA could give users the option to make any provider
> default for whatever UI it exposes for the declarative case.  But there are
> a couple fine points worth mentioning: one is that since users rarely want
> to make an engine default, adding that option to the UI all the time would
> be even more annoying than adding "[ ] And set as my homepage" to whatever
> UI is shown for "bookmark this page", and thus UAs may shy away from this
> idea.  Another is that engines may wish to explicitly request to be made
> default in response to some explicit user action on the page, e.g. clicking
> a "Make this my default search engine" button.  Creating this UI and making
> it work smoothly is difficult with the existing mechanisms.
>
> Note that I am not the one who proposed, specced, or implemented this in
> Chrome; I'm just trying to convey a few things that seem apparent to me as
> another Chrome UI engineer :)
>

Just to clarify, it was clear that many including other browsers didn't
suppport the asDefault parameter, and Google Chrome no longer supports it.

dave

Received on Friday, 16 December 2011 15:39:55 UTC