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Dear Microsoft: Please Do Pinned Menus Like This
- count 16y agoUm, I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that there will be at least one major browser bug leading to a remote compromise from this feature. Maybe I'm just paranoid...
- psadauskas 16y agoPerhaps, if the <link> points to a menu.xml you don't control? I'm not sure what you could do with this that couldn't also be done with <link rel=stylesheet>...
- count 16y agoSorry, I wasn't more clear. I meant the browser feature, not the specific implementation. I think the idea in the article was fantastic, and would be much cleaner for developers.
- count 16y agoWhy was this voted down so harshly?
- ars 16y agoIt didn't deserve -1, but I guess it was downvoted because it's wrong? Why would the existence of this feature lead to a remote compromise? The specific implementation maybe, but the idea??
- count 16y agoMy original comment deserved it then, not my clarification and praise of the implementation idea in the article? The idea of a website being able to inject things into the task bar menu seems like it would open the door for injecting things that overflow buffers, call other code, etc. What is the security model for that code? What are the limits on what the URL can point to, etc. It's not like the IE team has a stellar record for this kind of stuff?
- psadauskas 16y agoI can't seem to ropy to the child of this post, but this is a response to that. All of those risks are present for PDFs or png images. If the browser's XML parser is vulnerable, having this feature additionally available won't make and difference.
- aberkowitz 16y agoThe pinned menu feature allows you to put images and text on a native system menu. It is conceivable that a malicious person could use this to crash the browser, or have unauthorized code run.
- wccrawford 16y agoI have to agree with this article in that there is FAR too much text being added to the webpage for this functionality. Separating it out into a separate file is the way to go. You know, like CSS already does.
- sosuke 16y agoI wonder what the trade off is for 1KB of text or an extra HTTP request.
- scotth 16y agoWell...that's a good question from a performance standpoint, but it's more than that. Readability is important too.
- Yzupnick 16y agoI up voted both these comments because it just goes to show that different people care about different things. It is not a matter of better, just a matter of preference.
- ataggart 16y agoWouldn't the trade-off be between an extra 1KB on every page vs. a single extra HTTP request per user?
- mrkurt 16y agoNot exactly. It's more like 250-300 bytes gzipped and it's delivered through an established request.
- ElbertF 16y agoThe main advantage of a separate file is that it can be cached by the client.
- kroc 16y agoBear in mind that a HTTP Request is significantly slower than the bytes in the page. A request could be anything from .25s to 2 whole seconds, if the bandwidth is saturated. Not least problems with blocking other parallel downloads and delaying the initial paint. HTTP requests that are not images or the CSS are to be absolutely avoided!
- mrkurt 16y agoI mostly agree, with the exception of two things: 1) It's much easier to stick meta tags in HTML than it is to reference an external file in many cases (blog hosting services, hosted storefronts, etc). 2) Sites that make the best use of that menu will have different data depending on what page is pinned. We didn't do much implementation, but assuming enough people used IE9 we'd probably make that set of meta tags page dependent. Separating it into an external link when it's page specific data doesn't make a bunch of sense. Particularly page specific data that changes frequently. Also, that 1kb of text is more like 260 bytes gzipped (as it is for us). We'll survive. :)
- psadauskas 16y agoInteresting. I would have expected the Menu to be identical for a site or application. Maybe have different ones for a forum vs a dashboard, but identical between topics in the forum. What is the use-case for a different menu per-page? Do you expect users to pin different pages? And even gzipped, 260B * 1M pageviews/day is ~ 1GB a month. Plus the memory to hold the text, the CPU to compress it, versus serving a static file from Apache to the fraction of users the ask for it? Still sounds like a win. Maybe make it even more like stylesheets: embeddable in the page or linkable to another page.
- mfukar 16y ago1 GB a month? I download more than that in half an hour.
- SapphireSun 16y agoAlso, if you have 1M viewers a month, that 1 GB is probably a drop in the bucket.
- noibl 16y agoPrevious discussion for background: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1704173 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1704173
- alextgordon 16y agoThis guy totally called it: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1704293 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1704293 :)
- noibl 16y agoYeah, I was surprised not to see your sample XML in the article. I really hope this appeal gains some traction. Pinning and jump-lists should be seen as Windows 7 features, not IE9 features (which runs on Vista too).
- justinph 16y agoI'd put the odds of this feature even being used by most web developers at about 10%. If no other browser supports it, what's the point? It'd be much better if MS were to just take a page outline (from all the headlines) that were links and make their menu out of that. Or, look at the HTML5 <nav> elements. Then IE9 users might actually see it in use once in a blue moon.
- psadauskas 16y ago10% of the IE9 users is really a huge absolute number. It's probably larger, too, when you consider it could become applicable to all browsers on Windows 7. If it gains traction, it or something similar might be picked up by OSX or Gnome/KDE. It's still worth investigating doing it right, instead of letting IE define the standard, and letting it stagnate.
- houseabsolute 16y agoMaybe I'm just out of touch, but does anyone actually use the pinned menu? If no, does it matter how Microsoft decides to implement this? It seems like it's a feature roughly on the importance level of their web snippets feature; that is, not very important at all.
- zokier 16y agoConsidering that it's a upcoming feature in IE9 which is yet to be released, it is premature to say if anyone will actually use it.
- houseabsolute 16y agoThere are already jumplists for other applications. That's what I was asking about.
- trezor 16y agoI use the jumplists, pinned and recent documents/files/sites for a bunch of apps in Windows 7 (Outlook, Chrome, Visual Studio, Notepad, Remote desktop, etc etc). If websites comes to support this, I'm pretty sure I will welcome that as a feature. Not required by any means, but a nice extra.
- aik 16y agoI think it's great. I use it to pin common folders I visit, as well as notepad, word, and excel documents. It gets me what I want quickly.
- carussell 16y agoIt was always intended to be used by vendors for browser-specific features … HTML5 That's a pretty short time span for the definition of "always".