26 ms·

Google launches new “portal” HTML element

236 points by tannhaeuser 8y ago

jaredcwhite 8y ago
At first glance, this seems really cool. Then I remember it's Google we're talking about here. Somehow I feel like this is something they can use to benefit their search engine and/or AMP-style efforts. Keep more users within their controlled environments rather than officially navigating to a real website elsewhere. Also seems like potential phishing problems could arise. Can someone explain to me how this portal element to actually great and not just great for Google?
- mimixco 8y ago
  I'm with you on this one.
  - HNLurker2 8y ago
    Yes and I am tired of Google quick view of pages like Reddit
- parliament32 8y ago
  >Keep more users within their controlled environments rather than officially navigating to a real website elsewhere But that seems to be exactly what it does: look at the image at the top of the article, the address bar clearly changes to the portal-target's location. I think that's what they mean by "can be navigated into".
  - Spivak 8y ago
    Right but rather than making a seamless transition between pages they made it a subpage of the parent. Having built-in page previews is actually a useful feature but without the other useful feature of "play video" -> "click video to open page" -> "video continues playing while the rest of the real page renders around it" -> "you are now really on the other page with no connection to the previous page" it seems like the business motivation for this was to embed more content in Google Search while keeping Google branding in the background.
    - ddalex 8y ago
      This. It can allow you to see the google results and navigate from them seamlessly without actually leaving the top-level domain. It effectively captures the entire audience. There will be no more Internet, it's going to be a Google portal (like AOL) with Google keywords, and will "borrow" the content from everybody else.
      - co0nsta 8y ago
        How do you define "actually leaving"? Because after navigating to the portal, it occupies the whole viewport and becomes the main document with your site's URL. Even if we assume you use AMP, package it with signed exchange, and Google SERP displays it then, yeah, your site could appear with no extra network request to your site. The lack of network requests isn't that different to old school HTTP proxies but with better specs and security. AMP has analytics and stuff so if you want to count visits, go do that. I think the problem these technologies are meant to solve is making navigating between pages take under a hundred milliseconds and appear much faster by being able to preview/animate them. That would be good. Yeah, new technology is not without cost and risks but Google turning the web into a walled garden isn't high on my list of risks.
- sdegutis 8y ago
  It took me a few months to realize that when I browse google with my iPhone and click a link, it's not actually taking me to that site, just loading it in an iframe. Weird and unnecessary, except in the eyes of Google's margins.
  - superdisk 8y ago
    They also hijack the scrolling and often break parts of the site, I hate AMP with a passion.
    - lern_too_spel 8y ago
      The scrolling issues were due to a Safari bug. Unfortunately, Apple does not allow its users to install non-buggy browsers on their devices. I hate Apple devices with a passion.
- nerdponx 8y ago
  Embrace, extend, extinguish.
julienreszka 8y ago
This is so cool.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
tinus_hn 8y ago
I don’t like how Google now gets to ‘launch new HTML elements’ as they see fit for their own purposes.
- neilalexander 8y ago
  At the end of the day, web standards are nothing more than advisory and Google own a clear majority of browser market share. Who is going to stop them?
  - molf 8y ago
    We are, by using and recommending browsers not owned by advertising conglomerates.
    - neilalexander 8y ago
      I'm a very happy Safari user but evangelism is only going to get you so far. There need to be better alternatives.
  - pellefant 8y ago
    > Who is going to stop them? We are, 10s of millions of users (if not 100s).
  - oarsinsync 8y ago
    If mobile app store revenues can be used as a metric for revenues on the web generally, iOS users are a valuable demographic to target, even if they are the minority. If your website doesn't work in Safari, you're going to lose revenue. <portal> doesn't feel like something that will ever be supported in Safari.
  - jadell 8y ago
    People used to say that about IE6, before Firefox and Chrome came along.
    - int_19h 8y ago
progfix 8y ago
Do they use their internet dominance to invent a bunch of complex html elements so google becomes the only one being able to parse html effectively in the future? I hope not.
- neilalexander 8y ago
  I don't think Google can be wholly blamed for that dominance. It's only natural that they would want to invent their own web rendering engine and with it they can pretty much choose what they do. What's less natural is that so many other browsers/frameworks chose to be based upon it (like every Electron app in the world, Opera, Silk, Microsoft Edge real soon now™). Apart from Safari or Firefox, there aren't really many alternatives anymore.
  - tannhaeuser 8y ago
    IMO it's not so much about blaming or other moralistic category a la "Google is evil" than it is about whether we're going to accept and let happen the Googlification and appification of the web. If we do, than we (as in humanity) must look elsewhere now for our communication needs. Think about how involved the web in everyday life is (in education, personal communication, public services, contracts, law, webmail, ecommerce, etc. etc.). If we accept that this medium is going to slip away and out of control for no good reason, then we need to specify something with a more specific scope for preserving digital documents, contracts, transaction manifests etc. that is also fully able to represent existing (static or dynamic) HTML content. I'm not just talking the talk here: I've spent significant amout of time (years) in implementing SGML and an SGML grammar for HTML5 [1]. [1]: http://sgmljs.net/blog/blog1701.html http://sgmljs.net/blog/blog1701.html
  - AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
    It's the natural consequence of people clamoring to turn a simple hypertext engine into a full on application VM. Feature upon feature was piled on, producing a gigantic ludicrously complicated garbage fire the likes of which simply cannot be replicated by mortals, and to ensure this whoever is on top will keep adding to the garbage fire so no one can ever catch up. Web devs and evangelists of the world, you brought this on yourselves.
tangue 8y ago
We got rid of iframes, flash and WAP/imode. Thankfully we have now <portal>, Flutter and AMP.
- JoshMnem 8y ago
  Flutter looks like the junk food of programming. It looks like you get a choice between McDonald's (Google / Material Design) or Burger King (Apple). People are giving up long-term technology freedom for short-term, beginner's convenience.
  - asadlionpk 8y ago
    People said the same about JavaScript. Probably C too. Easier development = more developers.
    - JoshMnem 8y ago
      Flutter is restrictive in ways that JavaScript isn't.
zbrozek 8y ago
I don't understand why I should have any desire for this.
- dane-pgp 8y ago
  Depending on how it interacts with SRI, there is one interesting use case that could be supported. Imagine you had a data-uri / bookmarklet which loaded a <portal> of a web app, using the ideas discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17776456 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17776456 If the SRI hash on the data-uri could restrict the content of the portal to a trusted HTML document (containing SRI hashes for the scripts it referenced), then navigating "into" the portal would allow the browser to display the URL of the origin site, and run JavaScript in that context, with the TLS indicator visible. This would allow us to pin specific versions of web apps (if they were structured this way), and those apps could be subject to independent audit. Specifically, it would then be impossible for a compromised host to silently "upgrade" you to a new malicious version of the web app (or even downgrade you to an earlier version).
michaelt 8y ago
For example, engineers hope that when a user is navigating a news site, when they reach the bottom of a story, related links for other stories are embedded as portals, which the user can click and seamlessly transition to a new page. Perhaps it's not a very good description, but isn't that just a link? That sounds a lot like a link to me? So this example really doesn't make it clear to me why we need this new element?
- neilalexander 8y ago
  I think it's largely a user experience thing. Because the "portal" has already been loaded and rendered, you don't need to add the delay of loading the new page at the point of navigation.
  - rst 8y ago
    But if performance boosts from preloading are all you want, you could just add a 'preload' attribute to the usual <a> tag. The stated rationale of supporting spiffy transitions seems a bit more sensible, though, given how many hooks this has into browser UI, I'd be interested in seeing the limits on what, say, a malicious ad network could do with it. (Besides, if a page has several dozen links, exactly how many of them can you afford to preload before that activity starts bogging things down? The ZDnet article talks about this behavior replacing all links, which doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me...)
- bbatha 8y ago
  > but isn't that just a link? Its a modernized ifame. It seems like they can't introduce some of these features without breaking the security features of iframes.
lqet 8y ago
Can someone explain to me the innovation here, besides some page-transition eye-candy? > Furthermore, portals can also overwrite the main URL address bar, meaning they are useful as a navigation system Isn't this already possible with iframes and target="_top" / target="_parent"? You can also use the <base>-Tag inside the iframe. > The advantage over using Portals over classic links is that the content inside portals can be pre-loaded while the user scrolls through a page, and be ready to expand into a new page without having the user wait for it to load. What? What about the vast majority of links that appear in-line, in text (think Wikipedia). What about the increased bandwidth usage for pre-loaded pages I don't intend to visit? What about the obvious tracking issues? What about the further increased difficulty for users to even tell which page they are actually on, if the transition to another page is now smooth and not clear-cut? This article makes it seem like <portal> magically removes all the security concerns people had for decades with iframes, which imho is not the case at all.
- true_religion 8y ago
  With regards to bandwidth from pages you do not want to visit, sites can already include content that you do not care about in the page manually as part of the initial HTML or later via AJAX. In fact, the use case for portals covers this in that news sites commonly add other IMO irrelevant articles at the end of articles that I am reading.
- clairity 8y ago
  > "what about the obvious tracking issues?" frankly, tracking seems to be a primary purpose of the portal tag. it takes the imperative away from the user so that the server can make the decision about what you see and how intrusive it can be. the point seems to be to shift control to google.
  - ehsankia 8y ago
    How is prefetching taking the imperative away about what you see? You can click or not click. As for "tracking", the website could already ping as many servers as it wanted in the background, it's not like it can do anything new here. I honestly don't see how the server gets any more "power" than it already did.
fimdomeio 8y ago
But is it "google launches" or "google proposes"? I think semantic details matter a lot here. The article is written in a way that it makes it look like W3C does not exist.
- ergothus 8y ago
  Agreed. There's one line about a drafted standard, along with a note that no other browser vendor has expressed interest. I do not want to return to the days of incompatible browsers (to the degree it was) even if they now publish a draft of how it works - the goal is compatibility, not POTENTIAL compatibility.
verisimilitudes 8y ago
>Google engineers hope that their new Portals technology will take over the web and become the standard way in which websites transition between links. This is marketed as being similar to the iframe tag, but it's really an attack on the a tag.
- config_yml 8y ago
  Yes, with the benefit that the site which opened the portal (or link) still has control over the target. Sounds fishy and they’re trying to project this under a UX umbrella.
  - max76 8y ago
    Sure, so now Google will have an easier time following your around after you visit their search page. All results will open portals.
    - ddalex 8y ago
      you'll never leave the google top domain ever again you wouldn't even know you're not leaving it, because the address bar changes
Grumbledour 8y ago
It's kind of funny, how mobile today is a big part of traffic and this will only increase, yet while the mobile experience is already terrible, especially in chrome with no script blocker, google constantly works at making it even worse, with preloading of undesired, external content. Does Silicon Valley not have data caps? I guess they never have bad reception, though. So at least the malicious add that preloaded in the background can transition you seamlessly to a new page. As quick as if you newer saw the content you intended to. Progress! :-D
- y4mi 8y ago
  If you're connected to a VPN, install pi-hole on that network and use it as dns. If not, just get blokada from f-droid. It uses 1-3% energy over the day on my phone, but saves around 15% by filtering ads
  - bryanlarsen 8y ago
    Or just switch to Firefox on Android and use uBlock Origin or similar.
    - kermitismyhero 8y ago
      The recent extension-disabling problem made me realize how awful the unfiltered web is. Trying to use mobile Chrome for the first time ever was a dreadful experience. I legitimately had no idea that mobile Chrome doesn't have any extension capability whatsoever. I always assumed it was a Firefox-style unified experience where the same desktop extensions worked on mobile. I was horrified to discover otherwise. Ads ads ads everywhere. How do people actually live day-to-day with mobile browsers that have no true adblocking capability? Using mobile Chrome is like taking a stroll through a plague ward.
      - Wowfunhappy 8y ago
        I don’t use an Adblocker due to ethical concerns. (Not trying to convince you to do the same, just explaining.) It’s, uh, really not that bad. I rarely notice banner ads and the like. If a particular site gets really egrigious, I leave the site. I suspect that after using Adblock for years, your brain has forgotten how to ignore them.
svieira 8y ago
The reason for a new element, rather than just tacking this behavior onto `iframe` seems to be backwards compatibility [1]. > We wish to give user agents as much flexibility as possible to isolate the host and guest browsing contexts (in implementations, in separate processes), even when the active documents may be same origin-domain. To make this possible, we intend not to expose the Document or WindowProxy of the guest contents, via the IDL attributes on HTMLIFrameElement, by using access to named windows, or by indexed access to window.frames. Without such access, communication can be be guaranteed to be asynchronous and not require shared access to JavaScript objects. Those operations which don't apply to portal contexts would all need to be modified to throw an appropriate exception in such cases. [1]: https://github.com/WICG/portals/blob/master/explainer.md https://github.com/WICG/portals/blob/master/explainer.md
throwaway55554 8y ago
Wait! Seriously? Did IE of yore not teach anyone anything??? Or does the internet truly have that short of a memory span?
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
  Yes
ThinkingGuy 8y ago
I read this: "The advantage...is that the content inside portals can be pre-loaded while the user scrolls through a page, and be ready to expand into a new page without having the user wait for it to load." My brain translated it to this: "The advantage...is that advertisements can be pre-loaded while the user scrolls through a page, and be ready to add to Google's revenue without having the user to wait for it to load."
- Touche 8y ago
  Advertisements already can be and are preloaded. This just enables navigating to another page without going back to the server.
- zihotki 8y ago
  So shall we expect that google will penalize in search results the sites which don't use new "portal" element as they do now with AMP?
nine_k 8y ago
I had to double-check that it's not an article form 1999 or something, when everyone was building "portals", with a very similar premise of having everything in one place [1]. It took mere ~25 years in the industry to see things making rounds and old ideas coming back as new, unironically. X Terminal and "network computers" → browser, JVM → WASM, CGI → serverless, Modula/Oberon → Go; now <iframe> → <portal> and the whole idea around it. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_portal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_portal
josteink 8y ago
New “web-standard” from Google? Yeah. Not interested.
rlv-dan 8y ago
1999: Microsoft launches new HTML tag 2019: Google launches new HTML tag
Insanity 8y ago
The example they give seems bad to me. I'm fine just seeing the title of a news post and clicking that as a normal <a> tag. I don't need to see a miniature version of the post that I then need to click on to read anyway. Also, the preview problem... you could really just use an image as a link if you wanted to. Less convenient, that's true. But meh, this tag seems to offer little extra (to me).
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
pragmaticalien8 8y ago
what junk did this zdnet.com load from tru.am?
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
amelius 8y ago
I once tried to put Google Search in an iframe, so I could put some handy buttons on top of it. It was not allowed. Perhaps "portals" are the solution (?)
- julienreszka 8y ago
  I tried the same with top 50 most visited websites. https://julienreszka.github.io/dome/ https://julienreszka.github.io/dome/
rahuldottech 8y ago
> portals can be pre-loaded while the user scrolls through a page Let's be real here. This can already be done though <link> "prefetch" and "preload" [0]. This is just Google introducing more pointless tech that will make webpages clunkier for no good reason. Honestly, I can't think of a single purpose this serves that isn't already fulfilled by existing web tech. [0]: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/49491193/how-can-i-preemptively-load-a-web-page-or-resource/49491194#49491194 https://stackoverflow.com/questions/49491193/how-can-i-preem...
- smacktoward 8y ago
  It's not pointless at all. It makes the Web platform more complicated to implement, which, as the company that owns the leading browser, is in Google's interest. The more complicated the platform becomes, the harder and more expensive it will be for any potential competitors to ship a product that can challenge Chrome.
  - rahuldottech 8y ago
    I meant pointless to web tech and consumers. Obviously Google has their own reasons.
  - buzzert 8y ago
    More importantly, as it seems to require an implementation of native UI and not just rendering, it will harm browsers that are currently Chromium based.
- mikewhy 8y ago
  The spec goes into detail of why existing tech (iframes) aren't enough: https://github.com/WICG/portals/blob/master/explainer.md#faqs https://github.com/WICG/portals/blob/master/explainer.md#faq... https://github.com/WICG/portals/blob/master/explainer.md#alternatives-considered https://github.com/WICG/portals/blob/master/explainer.md#alt...
  - dqybh 8y ago
    https://github.com/WICG/portals/blob/master/explainer.md#iframe-promotion https://github.com/WICG/portals/blob/master/explainer.md#ifr... Heh, "we considered this but it's hard to do in Chrome". But they don't give a shit if <portal> is hard to do in Gecko, of course.
dag11 8y ago
What I don't understand is that many websites frame-bust to prevent phishing and click-jacking attacks on their content. But if Google wants to be accessible through portals, they'll have to open themselves up to the same phishing and click-jacking vulnerabilities, right?
pier25 8y ago
Is this coming to Chromium/Blink or only Chrome?
- shakna 8y ago
  It's been under the experimental flags in Chromium since August.
skymt 8y ago
Am I reading this wrong, or is Google pushing a fairly complex element with substantial security considerations into HTML exclusively to solve their UX problems with AMP and the pre-load search carousel? Like this seems like it would be a fair amount of work for browsers to implement, and Google is the only party who would benefit.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- ccnafr 8y ago
  No, you're right. Portal is effectively iframe without all the security protections.
  - Ajedi32 8y ago
    It's kinda the opposite actually. iframes didn't provide sufficient security to do the sort of things Google wanted to be able to do with them, so they had to design a new standard with better protections: https://github.com/WICG/portals/blob/master/explainer.md#why-do-we-need-a-new-html-tag-why-not-use-iframe https://github.com/WICG/portals/blob/master/explainer.md#why...
  - Touche 8y ago
    I don't understand the cynicism people have for this idea. All they did was say "wouldn't it be cool if you could have nice animations in between pages" and built a proof-of-concept. It's not a finished product. They aren't forcing it into a standard. It's a demo of something that would be cool. So why the heck are people opposed to that?
    - vernie 8y ago
      Well you certainly can't raise a stink after it's in the standard.
      - Touche 8y ago
dkonieczek 8y ago
I enabled portals in Canary and tested out the demo. For some reason after the portal has activated, I can no longer go back to the previous page. So much for "take over the web and become the standard way in which websites transition between links". I wonder how much this will confuse the average user. I hope that this is still due to it being experimental.
atonse 8y ago
I hope ad blockers can universally block this tag. This seems like an attempt for them to make ads even more annoying.
- zzo38computer 8y ago
  Or just replace them with normal links (or iframes, depending on the user setting).
atonse 8y ago
Also just realized, as much as people like to push all the snark about Microsoft regarding Embrace, Extend, Extinguish, that's exactly what Google is doing right now. With them dominating browser share, they can now push tags like this that only make ads more annoying. Geez we so badly need a more balanced browser landscape.
- strictfp 8y ago
  The good thing is that they are already starting, so that the red flags are risen early.
  - evv 8y ago
    Have you considered that it is already too late? Just look at Microsoft bending the knee to Chromium
    - sixothree 8y ago
      I wonder if Chrome browser could survive if it was spun off from parent company.
      - FridgeSeal 8y ago
        Google wouldn't allow that, as that would remove one of their primary means of influencing things in their favour.
- kinkrtyavimoodh 8y ago
  Unfortunately people seem to have such short memories. Most millennials today were too young to see Microsoft's evil side and so think people like me who have a lingering distrust for that company are just old luddites with axes to grind. OTOH, they grew up indoctrinated to Google and so refuse to see the water coming slowly to a boil.
jug 8y ago
Am I back in the late 1990's?
- layoutIfNeeded 8y ago
  <marquee>yes</marquee>
  - jdofaz 8y ago
    <blink><marquee>yes</marquee></blink>
bArray 8y ago
> Furthermore, portals can also overwrite the main URL > address bar, meaning they are useful as a navigation > system, and more than embedding content --the most common > way in which iframes are used today. Well, this looks like the next hack/scam feature. I really hate to think of the sort of rubbish that this will cause. > Google says portals allow users to navigate inside the > content they are embedding --something that iframes do not > allow for security reasons. Surely this is exactly why the "portal" shouldn't do this either? Why not work towards fixing the security issues of the iframe? Regarding pre-loading content in links, they could just implement this in the browser if they think it's really that important. This will destroy your mobile data. I really wish they had sat down and discussed this with other browser teams to flesh it out. I think part of this is in getting the jump on other browsers, this really will take a long time to implement securely.
zelpo 8y ago
Nice, this will be depreciated in 6 months
amenod 8y ago
I really, really, really hope this is never supported by other browsers.
JoshMnem 8y ago
It's going to hurt small sites the most, because sources of traffic like Google, Facebook, and other large sites will eventually stop linking to websites, and load them as previews in frames ("portals") instead. "No other browser vendor has expressed interest in supporting the Portals" -- but Google is releasing it in Chrome anyway. It changes the fundamental nature of the WWW as linked documents. Embrace, Extend, Extinguish. The only conclusion I can come to about things like AMP and portals is that Google is actively trying to kill the Web. > "Google engineers hope that their new Portals technology will take over the web and become the standard way in which websites transition between links."
- superkuh 8y ago
  > sources of traffic like Google, Facebook, and other large sites will eventually stop linking to websites, and load them as previews in frames ("portals") instead. That's already happening to an extent with local AMP caches of outbound links 3rd party links on AMP enabled pages at cloudflare.
- keiru 8y ago
  In what way loading a site on a portal would be different to loading it on the main window? Portals sound like just a technical UX solution, but would still count as site traffic.
  - JoshMnem 8y ago
    It looks like a way to sort-of link to a site, but to make the default action to return back to the linking site instead of going deeper into the other site. You aren't sending people to the target page, but are just loading a preview. As the target website, even if your analytics show a visit, it might not be a full visit. 15 years ago, it was common for website owners to ask you to "make all links open in a frame" so that the original site could keep a frame on top of all the other content. That was probably only stopped by JavaScript snippets to break out of frames. Portals is the same kind of idea -- give power to the sites that link out (like Google) at the expense of the smaller sites that receive links.
  - 8y ago
rangerpolitic 8y ago
I am growing increasingly annoyed with "user experience." It's becoming a catchall excuse for Google and others to inject all kinds of crap that no one wants.
skybrian 8y ago
The idea seems to be able to show a preview of a page, then navigate into it if the user chooses, without reloading it. Here is an explainer: https://github.com/WICG/portals/blob/master/explainer.md https://github.com/WICG/portals/blob/master/explainer.md
thefounder 8y ago
This seems designed to stop people leaving Google search/news
option_greek 8y ago
>https://github.com/WICG/portals/blob/master/explainer.md https://github.com/WICG/portals/blob/master/explainer.md >This is a proposal for enabling seamless navigations between sites or pages. In particular, this proposal enables a page to show another page as an inset and perform a seamless transition between an inset state and a navigated state. Like clicking on an ad ?
deleted 8y ago
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jeena 8y ago
Interesting that nowadays Google is launching HTML elements.
Jtsummers 8y ago
> Google launched a new technology called Portals How is an HTML tag a technology?
hn23 8y ago
Google is really becoming the MS of these days... "This page is optimized for Chrome."
_bxg1 8y ago
Welcome to a world in which "web standards" are just everyone else trying to keep in step with whatever Google launched this week.
prepend 8y ago
“Google says portals allow users to navigate inside the content they are embedding --something that iframes do not allow for security reasons.” I love how they gloss over the security issue here. This is the equivalent of “we made a new Ajax that can call from different domains.” Reading through the article, I don’t see the security restriction addressed at all. I expect that this gets worked on when google submits this to the w3c to be made part of html.
- mshockwave 8y ago
  that's also my first impression of this article. but i (hope) believe google is aware of this security concern, otherwise they'll probably be the next Microsoft
  - m1sta_ 8y ago
    Google search is Windows?
- burtonator2011 8y ago
  My expectation is that you could only do this for the same domain.
  - ChrisSD 8y ago
    If that is true, how would that interact with signed exchanges[0]? [0] https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2018/11/signed-exchanges https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2018/11/signed-exc...
  - stevens32 8y ago
    Looks like that's not the case based on the blog post linked in the article https://web.dev/hands-on-portals/ https://web.dev/hands-on-portals/
- dillondoyle 8y ago
  It says that it only allows postMessage for cross domain communication. BUT I'm concerned it doesn't mention similar sandbox and feature policies as iFrame. It also mentions that it will allow the 'child' to know if it's inside a portal with window.portalHost but at least this github mentions you can minimally declare no-referrer https://github.com/web-platform-tests/wpt/blob/master/portals/portals-no-referrer.html https://github.com/web-platform-tests/wpt/blob/master/portal... Wouldn't the concern be ads ( I assume this is what this feature is intended for especially on mobile )? If there are no similar restrictions as a iframe safeFrame I can see a ton of ad scams that take advantage...
founderling 8y ago
I would be surprised if Google would allow to "link" to their page by putting it in a portal tag. Just like they don't allow putting their pages in iframes: https://jsfiddle.net/yea0jvxL/ https://jsfiddle.net/yea0jvxL/ But I would not be surprised if they put all search results in portal links and therefore keep all users on their site.
yellowapple 8y ago
Embrace -> [Extend] -> Extinguish Now that Chrome is quickly becoming (if not has outright become) the new Internet Explorer, I wonder what browser will come out in a few years to be the next Chrome?
jpalomaki 8y ago
Reminds me of the old Google Caja project. ”The Caja Compiler is a tool for making third party HTML, CSS and JavaScript safe to embed in your website. It enables rich interaction between the embedding page and the embedded applications.” https://developers.google.com/caja/#benefits-of-using-caja https://developers.google.com/caja/#benefits-of-using-caja
kerng 8y ago
Google indeed is the new Internet Explorer with adding these random, of course standardized and open features.
vernie 8y ago
AMP is fast, yes. Everything else about it fucking sucks.
ConcernedCoder 8y ago
Oh! I'm sure that won't be exploited by hackers... thanks google.
ivarv 8y ago
Throwback to 2003! At first glance this seems _very_ reminiscent of the Java Portlet standard - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Java_Portlet_Specification https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Java_Portlet_Specification
leshokunin 8y ago
Great. This looks like another feature for AMP, but disguis.. I mean packaged as something generic. I’m really not fond of how Google is driving AMP as the go-to way to get better visibility on Google. This is going to introduce more headaches and very little to no upside. I don’t understand why they keep building things without talking to the user. There are other users than Google developers out there, and very little demand for AMP.
lol768 8y ago
It's not in the list here https://mozilla.github.io/standards-positions/ https://mozilla.github.io/standards-positions/ and the spec (https://wicg.github.io/portals/#the-portal-element https://wicg.github.io/portals/#the-portal-element) is written solely by folks at Google and doesn't appear to be an actual W3C spec. Why should anybody care about this until it's standardised and implemented by more than one browser vendor? To talk of a browser vendor "launching" a new element is also ridiculous - Google have no authority to "launch" an element for the web as if it were some product they decided to update. Article title is poor in this respect. Looking at the actual spec: > This specification extends [HTML] to define a new kind of top-level browsing context, which can be embedded in another document, and a mechanism for replacing the contents of another top-level browsing context with the previously embedded context. 1) Why not an iframe? 2) Why not a link to the iframe src? Or is the link here from within the iframe? Surely that's possible already with a postMessage and a window.location change. I don't understand the benefits here. Is the sole purpose of this to avoid a HTTP request?
- p4bl0 8y ago
  I agree with most of your comment. However, I don't think the claim that Google is launching a new element is ridiculous (even if I'm sad about it). That's more or less how it worked during the IE vs Netscape war. Remember those fancy <marquee> and <blink> tags for example. Standardization came second.
EastSmith 8y ago
Looks to me as an effort to make any user visiting google.com to not actually leave google.com FOREVER. Users will get portal-ed to a result page (with the browser's url bar showing foo.com, instead of google.com), but the user will be tracked the entire time from google, since they would be still on google.com.
- dual_basis 8y ago
  "Don't be evil" is now well in the rear view mirror.
  - amingilani 8y ago
    How? I understand that you're expressing a sentiment, but why do you think it's relevant here?
- dillondoyle 8y ago
  Feels more like a way to recreate FB's in-app 'Instant Experience' - especially given the example videos are mobile and look very similar UI. I can see a lot of value in serving a mobile ad, and then having clicks open this overlay experience which was pre-loaded.
- zavi 8y ago
  If mywebsite.com embeds the portal for othersite.com, and user navigates into it, is there a way for mywebsite.com to keep tracking user interactions inside othersite.com?
  - coolspot 8y ago
    No, after you navigated to the portal page it is like you have clicked a link - whole browser context is replaced with portal's.
- ne01 8y ago
  I'm so happy that duckduckgo.com is getting better and better over time. I tried to use it for a month 2 years ago and switched back to Google. Now it has been 3 months and I don't notice -- which is a very good thing!
bluepnume 8y ago
I wrote a quick article on the differences between portals and iframes: https://medium.com/@bluepnume/google-chromes-portals-like-iframes-but-better-and-worse-29e0bbb3f78e https://medium.com/@bluepnume/google-chromes-portals-like-if...
busymom0 8y ago
I honestly don't see the point of this unless it gets widely adopted by other browsers (which is an obvious point). Mobile is already a huge market and on iOS at least, even chrome and safari simply use the iOS built in WKWebView with a UI wrapper around it. So unless Apple decides to include <portal>, wouldn't this not work on any iOS browsers? I also use Android but don't use Chrome due to it's lack of extension and content blocker support. So other browsers on Android will also need to adopt this.
partiallypro 8y ago
I don't know why anyone would truly adopt this. It's very Google centric and didn't have any major benefits outside YouTube ad sales.
Liron 8y ago
So many snarky comments here. Chill. Portal is just an iFrame that has the ability to smoothly transition itself into being the top-level URL while maintaining its inner state.
vmware 8y ago
I am Dotnet Developer, and working for Coupon Sites and create so many sites http://www.micropromocodes.com/ http://www.micropromocodes.com/ http://www.visualstudioprofessionalpromocode.com/ http://www.visualstudioprofessionalpromocode.com/ http://www.office2019promocode.com/ http://www.office2019promocode.com/ http://www.vmwarefusionpromocode.net http://www.vmwarefusionpromocode.net
cromwellian 8y ago
The headline is wrong, nothing was 'launched', rather, an experimental feature was added to chrome://flags, just like the gazillions of other features that are hidden behind flags until they are standardized and shipped.
antibland 8y ago
The best-case scenario for the future health of the web is for Mozilla to resist supporting <portal>, which will hopefully dissuade companies from adding this element to their products.
makecheck 8y ago
A substantial amount of browsing is now done on battery and expensive data plans so “no thanks” to all these preload-100-things technologies. Just waste, multiplied by more waste.
ilaksh 8y ago
Is Firefox going to implement it? Seems like a lot of pressure on that team to ensure it makes sense. And if they find a reason not to implement it they may be really screwed because of the control Google has.
sexyflanders 8y ago
Annnd thats why I don't run chrome
jonathankoren 8y ago
This isn’t a W3C element, correct? So it’s Microsoft’s embrace and extend strategy.
yason 8y ago
I think things started to go more or less downhill since HTML 2.0. For the kind of web browsing I'm used to value text and images go a long way and they don't really allow for anything too intrusive. There were tons of interesting sites online in the 90's and basically none of them were bad because they were missing some essential interactive page/UI elements. Most of them were near-instant already at the time if you had something better than a modem connection. Things could've gone heavenly if the nerds who built that only weren't a minority. At least we still have text terminals and ssh...

236 points by tannhaeuser 8y ago

At first glance, this seems really cool. Then I remember it's Google we're talking about here. Somehow I feel like this is something they can use to benefit their search engine and/or AMP-style efforts. Keep more users within their controlled environments rather than officially navigating to a real website elsewhere. Also seems like potential phishing problems could arise. Can someone explain to me how this portal element to actually great and not just great for Google?

mimixco 8y ago
I'm with you on this one.
- HNLurker2 8y ago
  Yes and I am tired of Google quick view of pages like Reddit
parliament32 8y ago
>Keep more users within their controlled environments rather than officially navigating to a real website elsewhere But that seems to be exactly what it does: look at the image at the top of the article, the address bar clearly changes to the portal-target's location. I think that's what they mean by "can be navigated into".
- Spivak 8y ago
  Right but rather than making a seamless transition between pages they made it a subpage of the parent. Having built-in page previews is actually a useful feature but without the other useful feature of "play video" -> "click video to open page" -> "video continues playing while the rest of the real page renders around it" -> "you are now really on the other page with no connection to the previous page" it seems like the business motivation for this was to embed more content in Google Search while keeping Google branding in the background.
  - ddalex 8y ago
    This. It can allow you to see the google results and navigate from them seamlessly without actually leaving the top-level domain. It effectively captures the entire audience. There will be no more Internet, it's going to be a Google portal (like AOL) with Google keywords, and will "borrow" the content from everybody else.
    - co0nsta 8y ago
      How do you define "actually leaving"? Because after navigating to the portal, it occupies the whole viewport and becomes the main document with your site's URL. Even if we assume you use AMP, package it with signed exchange, and Google SERP displays it then, yeah, your site could appear with no extra network request to your site. The lack of network requests isn't that different to old school HTTP proxies but with better specs and security. AMP has analytics and stuff so if you want to count visits, go do that. I think the problem these technologies are meant to solve is making navigating between pages take under a hundred milliseconds and appear much faster by being able to preview/animate them. That would be good. Yeah, new technology is not without cost and risks but Google turning the web into a walled garden isn't high on my list of risks.
sdegutis 8y ago
It took me a few months to realize that when I browse google with my iPhone and click a link, it's not actually taking me to that site, just loading it in an iframe. Weird and unnecessary, except in the eyes of Google's margins.
- superdisk 8y ago
  They also hijack the scrolling and often break parts of the site, I hate AMP with a passion.
  - lern_too_spel 8y ago
    The scrolling issues were due to a Safari bug. Unfortunately, Apple does not allow its users to install non-buggy browsers on their devices. I hate Apple devices with a passion.
nerdponx 8y ago
Embrace, extend, extinguish.

julienreszka 8y ago

This is so cool.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

tinus_hn 8y ago

I don’t like how Google now gets to ‘launch new HTML elements’ as they see fit for their own purposes.

neilalexander 8y ago
At the end of the day, web standards are nothing more than advisory and Google own a clear majority of browser market share. Who is going to stop them?
- molf 8y ago
  We are, by using and recommending browsers not owned by advertising conglomerates.
  - neilalexander 8y ago
    I'm a very happy Safari user but evangelism is only going to get you so far. There need to be better alternatives.
- pellefant 8y ago
  > Who is going to stop them? We are, 10s of millions of users (if not 100s).
- oarsinsync 8y ago
  If mobile app store revenues can be used as a metric for revenues on the web generally, iOS users are a valuable demographic to target, even if they are the minority. If your website doesn't work in Safari, you're going to lose revenue. <portal> doesn't feel like something that will ever be supported in Safari.
- jadell 8y ago
  People used to say that about IE6, before Firefox and Chrome came along.
  - int_19h 8y ago

progfix 8y ago

Do they use their internet dominance to invent a bunch of complex html elements so google becomes the only one being able to parse html effectively in the future? I hope not.

neilalexander 8y ago
I don't think Google can be wholly blamed for that dominance. It's only natural that they would want to invent their own web rendering engine and with it they can pretty much choose what they do. What's less natural is that so many other browsers/frameworks chose to be based upon it (like every Electron app in the world, Opera, Silk, Microsoft Edge real soon now™). Apart from Safari or Firefox, there aren't really many alternatives anymore.
- tannhaeuser 8y ago
  IMO it's not so much about blaming or other moralistic category a la "Google is evil" than it is about whether we're going to accept and let happen the Googlification and appification of the web. If we do, than we (as in humanity) must look elsewhere now for our communication needs. Think about how involved the web in everyday life is (in education, personal communication, public services, contracts, law, webmail, ecommerce, etc. etc.). If we accept that this medium is going to slip away and out of control for no good reason, then we need to specify something with a more specific scope for preserving digital documents, contracts, transaction manifests etc. that is also fully able to represent existing (static or dynamic) HTML content. I'm not just talking the talk here: I've spent significant amout of time (years) in implementing SGML and an SGML grammar for HTML5 [1]. [1]: http://sgmljs.net/blog/blog1701.html http://sgmljs.net/blog/blog1701.html
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
  It's the natural consequence of people clamoring to turn a simple hypertext engine into a full on application VM. Feature upon feature was piled on, producing a gigantic ludicrously complicated garbage fire the likes of which simply cannot be replicated by mortals, and to ensure this whoever is on top will keep adding to the garbage fire so no one can ever catch up. Web devs and evangelists of the world, you brought this on yourselves.

tangue 8y ago

We got rid of iframes, flash and WAP/imode. Thankfully we have now <portal>, Flutter and AMP.

JoshMnem 8y ago
Flutter looks like the junk food of programming. It looks like you get a choice between McDonald's (Google / Material Design) or Burger King (Apple). People are giving up long-term technology freedom for short-term, beginner's convenience.
- asadlionpk 8y ago
  People said the same about JavaScript. Probably C too. Easier development = more developers.
  - JoshMnem 8y ago
    Flutter is restrictive in ways that JavaScript isn't.

zbrozek 8y ago

I don't understand why I should have any desire for this.

dane-pgp 8y ago
Depending on how it interacts with SRI, there is one interesting use case that could be supported. Imagine you had a data-uri / bookmarklet which loaded a <portal> of a web app, using the ideas discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17776456 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17776456 If the SRI hash on the data-uri could restrict the content of the portal to a trusted HTML document (containing SRI hashes for the scripts it referenced), then navigating "into" the portal would allow the browser to display the URL of the origin site, and run JavaScript in that context, with the TLS indicator visible. This would allow us to pin specific versions of web apps (if they were structured this way), and those apps could be subject to independent audit. Specifically, it would then be impossible for a compromised host to silently "upgrade" you to a new malicious version of the web app (or even downgrade you to an earlier version).

michaelt 8y ago

For example, engineers hope that when a user is navigating a news site, when they reach the bottom of a story, related links for other stories are embedded as portals, which the user can click and seamlessly transition to a new page. Perhaps it's not a very good description, but isn't that just a link? That sounds a lot like a link to me? So this example really doesn't make it clear to me why we need this new element?

neilalexander 8y ago
I think it's largely a user experience thing. Because the "portal" has already been loaded and rendered, you don't need to add the delay of loading the new page at the point of navigation.
- rst 8y ago
  But if performance boosts from preloading are all you want, you could just add a 'preload' attribute to the usual <a> tag. The stated rationale of supporting spiffy transitions seems a bit more sensible, though, given how many hooks this has into browser UI, I'd be interested in seeing the limits on what, say, a malicious ad network could do with it. (Besides, if a page has several dozen links, exactly how many of them can you afford to preload before that activity starts bogging things down? The ZDnet article talks about this behavior replacing all links, which doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me...)
bbatha 8y ago
> but isn't that just a link? Its a modernized ifame. It seems like they can't introduce some of these features without breaking the security features of iframes.

lqet 8y ago

Can someone explain to me the innovation here, besides some page-transition eye-candy? > Furthermore, portals can also overwrite the main URL address bar, meaning they are useful as a navigation system Isn't this already possible with iframes and target="_top" / target="_parent"? You can also use the <base>-Tag inside the iframe. > The advantage over using Portals over classic links is that the content inside portals can be pre-loaded while the user scrolls through a page, and be ready to expand into a new page without having the user wait for it to load. What? What about the vast majority of links that appear in-line, in text (think Wikipedia). What about the increased bandwidth usage for pre-loaded pages I don't intend to visit? What about the obvious tracking issues? What about the further increased difficulty for users to even tell which page they are actually on, if the transition to another page is now smooth and not clear-cut? This article makes it seem like <portal> magically removes all the security concerns people had for decades with iframes, which imho is not the case at all.

true_religion 8y ago
With regards to bandwidth from pages you do not want to visit, sites can already include content that you do not care about in the page manually as part of the initial HTML or later via AJAX. In fact, the use case for portals covers this in that news sites commonly add other IMO irrelevant articles at the end of articles that I am reading.
clairity 8y ago
> "what about the obvious tracking issues?" frankly, tracking seems to be a primary purpose of the portal tag. it takes the imperative away from the user so that the server can make the decision about what you see and how intrusive it can be. the point seems to be to shift control to google.
- ehsankia 8y ago
  How is prefetching taking the imperative away about what you see? You can click or not click. As for "tracking", the website could already ping as many servers as it wanted in the background, it's not like it can do anything new here. I honestly don't see how the server gets any more "power" than it already did.

fimdomeio 8y ago

But is it "google launches" or "google proposes"? I think semantic details matter a lot here. The article is written in a way that it makes it look like W3C does not exist.

ergothus 8y ago
Agreed. There's one line about a drafted standard, along with a note that no other browser vendor has expressed interest. I do not want to return to the days of incompatible browsers (to the degree it was) even if they now publish a draft of how it works - the goal is compatibility, not POTENTIAL compatibility.

verisimilitudes 8y ago

>Google engineers hope that their new Portals technology will take over the web and become the standard way in which websites transition between links. This is marketed as being similar to the iframe tag, but it's really an attack on the a tag.

config_yml 8y ago
Yes, with the benefit that the site which opened the portal (or link) still has control over the target. Sounds fishy and they’re trying to project this under a UX umbrella.
- max76 8y ago
  Sure, so now Google will have an easier time following your around after you visit their search page. All results will open portals.
  - ddalex 8y ago
    you'll never leave the google top domain ever again you wouldn't even know you're not leaving it, because the address bar changes

Grumbledour 8y ago

It's kind of funny, how mobile today is a big part of traffic and this will only increase, yet while the mobile experience is already terrible, especially in chrome with no script blocker, google constantly works at making it even worse, with preloading of undesired, external content. Does Silicon Valley not have data caps? I guess they never have bad reception, though. So at least the malicious add that preloaded in the background can transition you seamlessly to a new page. As quick as if you newer saw the content you intended to. Progress! :-D

y4mi 8y ago
If you're connected to a VPN, install pi-hole on that network and use it as dns. If not, just get blokada from f-droid. It uses 1-3% energy over the day on my phone, but saves around 15% by filtering ads
- bryanlarsen 8y ago
  Or just switch to Firefox on Android and use uBlock Origin or similar.
  - kermitismyhero 8y ago
    The recent extension-disabling problem made me realize how awful the unfiltered web is. Trying to use mobile Chrome for the first time ever was a dreadful experience. I legitimately had no idea that mobile Chrome doesn't have any extension capability whatsoever. I always assumed it was a Firefox-style unified experience where the same desktop extensions worked on mobile. I was horrified to discover otherwise. Ads ads ads everywhere. How do people actually live day-to-day with mobile browsers that have no true adblocking capability? Using mobile Chrome is like taking a stroll through a plague ward.
    - Wowfunhappy 8y ago
      I don’t use an Adblocker due to ethical concerns. (Not trying to convince you to do the same, just explaining.) It’s, uh, really not that bad. I rarely notice banner ads and the like. If a particular site gets really egrigious, I leave the site. I suspect that after using Adblock for years, your brain has forgotten how to ignore them.

svieira 8y ago

The reason for a new element, rather than just tacking this behavior onto `iframe` seems to be backwards compatibility [1]. > We wish to give user agents as much flexibility as possible to isolate the host and guest browsing contexts (in implementations, in separate processes), even when the active documents may be same origin-domain. To make this possible, we intend not to expose the Document or WindowProxy of the guest contents, via the IDL attributes on HTMLIFrameElement, by using access to named windows, or by indexed access to window.frames. Without such access, communication can be be guaranteed to be asynchronous and not require shared access to JavaScript objects. Those operations which don't apply to portal contexts would all need to be modified to throw an appropriate exception in such cases. [1]: https://github.com/WICG/portals/blob/master/explainer.md https://github.com/WICG/portals/blob/master/explainer.md

throwaway55554 8y ago

Wait! Seriously? Did IE of yore not teach anyone anything??? Or does the internet truly have that short of a memory span?

AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
Yes

ThinkingGuy 8y ago

I read this: "The advantage...is that the content inside portals can be pre-loaded while the user scrolls through a page, and be ready to expand into a new page without having the user wait for it to load." My brain translated it to this: "The advantage...is that advertisements can be pre-loaded while the user scrolls through a page, and be ready to add to Google's revenue without having the user to wait for it to load."

Touche 8y ago
Advertisements already can be and are preloaded. This just enables navigating to another page without going back to the server.
zihotki 8y ago
So shall we expect that google will penalize in search results the sites which don't use new "portal" element as they do now with AMP?

nine_k 8y ago

I had to double-check that it's not an article form 1999 or something, when everyone was building "portals", with a very similar premise of having everything in one place [1]. It took mere ~25 years in the industry to see things making rounds and old ideas coming back as new, unironically. X Terminal and "network computers" → browser, JVM → WASM, CGI → serverless, Modula/Oberon → Go; now <iframe> → <portal> and the whole idea around it. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_portal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_portal

josteink 8y ago

New “web-standard” from Google? Yeah. Not interested.

rlv-dan 8y ago

1999: Microsoft launches new HTML tag 2019: Google launches new HTML tag

Insanity 8y ago

The example they give seems bad to me. I'm fine just seeing the title of a news post and clicking that as a normal <a> tag. I don't need to see a miniature version of the post that I then need to click on to read anyway. Also, the preview problem... you could really just use an image as a link if you wanted to. Less convenient, that's true. But meh, this tag seems to offer little extra (to me).

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

pragmaticalien8 8y ago

what junk did this zdnet.com load from tru.am?

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

deleted 8y ago

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amelius 8y ago

I once tried to put Google Search in an iframe, so I could put some handy buttons on top of it. It was not allowed. Perhaps "portals" are the solution (?)

julienreszka 8y ago
I tried the same with top 50 most visited websites. https://julienreszka.github.io/dome/ https://julienreszka.github.io/dome/

rahuldottech 8y ago

> portals can be pre-loaded while the user scrolls through a page Let's be real here. This can already be done though <link> "prefetch" and "preload" [0]. This is just Google introducing more pointless tech that will make webpages clunkier for no good reason. Honestly, I can't think of a single purpose this serves that isn't already fulfilled by existing web tech. [0]: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/49491193/how-can-i-preemptively-load-a-web-page-or-resource/49491194#49491194 https://stackoverflow.com/questions/49491193/how-can-i-preem...

smacktoward 8y ago
It's not pointless at all. It makes the Web platform more complicated to implement, which, as the company that owns the leading browser, is in Google's interest. The more complicated the platform becomes, the harder and more expensive it will be for any potential competitors to ship a product that can challenge Chrome.
- rahuldottech 8y ago
  I meant pointless to web tech and consumers. Obviously Google has their own reasons.
- buzzert 8y ago
  More importantly, as it seems to require an implementation of native UI and not just rendering, it will harm browsers that are currently Chromium based.
mikewhy 8y ago
The spec goes into detail of why existing tech (iframes) aren't enough: https://github.com/WICG/portals/blob/master/explainer.md#faqs https://github.com/WICG/portals/blob/master/explainer.md#faq... https://github.com/WICG/portals/blob/master/explainer.md#alternatives-considered https://github.com/WICG/portals/blob/master/explainer.md#alt...
- dqybh 8y ago
  https://github.com/WICG/portals/blob/master/explainer.md#iframe-promotion https://github.com/WICG/portals/blob/master/explainer.md#ifr... Heh, "we considered this but it's hard to do in Chrome". But they don't give a shit if <portal> is hard to do in Gecko, of course.

dag11 8y ago

What I don't understand is that many websites frame-bust to prevent phishing and click-jacking attacks on their content. But if Google wants to be accessible through portals, they'll have to open themselves up to the same phishing and click-jacking vulnerabilities, right?

pier25 8y ago

Is this coming to Chromium/Blink or only Chrome?

shakna 8y ago
It's been under the experimental flags in Chromium since August.

skymt 8y ago

Am I reading this wrong, or is Google pushing a fairly complex element with substantial security considerations into HTML exclusively to solve their UX problems with AMP and the pre-load search carousel? Like this seems like it would be a fair amount of work for browsers to implement, and Google is the only party who would benefit.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
ccnafr 8y ago
No, you're right. Portal is effectively iframe without all the security protections.
- Ajedi32 8y ago
  It's kinda the opposite actually. iframes didn't provide sufficient security to do the sort of things Google wanted to be able to do with them, so they had to design a new standard with better protections: https://github.com/WICG/portals/blob/master/explainer.md#why-do-we-need-a-new-html-tag-why-not-use-iframe https://github.com/WICG/portals/blob/master/explainer.md#why...
- Touche 8y ago
  I don't understand the cynicism people have for this idea. All they did was say "wouldn't it be cool if you could have nice animations in between pages" and built a proof-of-concept. It's not a finished product. They aren't forcing it into a standard. It's a demo of something that would be cool. So why the heck are people opposed to that?
  - vernie 8y ago
    Well you certainly can't raise a stink after it's in the standard.
    - Touche 8y ago

dkonieczek 8y ago

I enabled portals in Canary and tested out the demo. For some reason after the portal has activated, I can no longer go back to the previous page. So much for "take over the web and become the standard way in which websites transition between links". I wonder how much this will confuse the average user. I hope that this is still due to it being experimental.

atonse 8y ago

I hope ad blockers can universally block this tag. This seems like an attempt for them to make ads even more annoying.

zzo38computer 8y ago
Or just replace them with normal links (or iframes, depending on the user setting).

atonse 8y ago

Also just realized, as much as people like to push all the snark about Microsoft regarding Embrace, Extend, Extinguish, that's exactly what Google is doing right now. With them dominating browser share, they can now push tags like this that only make ads more annoying. Geez we so badly need a more balanced browser landscape.

strictfp 8y ago
The good thing is that they are already starting, so that the red flags are risen early.
- evv 8y ago
  Have you considered that it is already too late? Just look at Microsoft bending the knee to Chromium
  - sixothree 8y ago
    I wonder if Chrome browser could survive if it was spun off from parent company.
    - FridgeSeal 8y ago
      Google wouldn't allow that, as that would remove one of their primary means of influencing things in their favour.
kinkrtyavimoodh 8y ago
Unfortunately people seem to have such short memories. Most millennials today were too young to see Microsoft's evil side and so think people like me who have a lingering distrust for that company are just old luddites with axes to grind. OTOH, they grew up indoctrinated to Google and so refuse to see the water coming slowly to a boil.

jug 8y ago

Am I back in the late 1990's?

layoutIfNeeded 8y ago
<marquee>yes</marquee>
- jdofaz 8y ago
  <blink><marquee>yes</marquee></blink>

bArray 8y ago

> Furthermore, portals can also overwrite the main URL > address bar, meaning they are useful as a navigation > system, and more than embedding content --the most common > way in which iframes are used today. Well, this looks like the next hack/scam feature. I really hate to think of the sort of rubbish that this will cause. > Google says portals allow users to navigate inside the > content they are embedding --something that iframes do not > allow for security reasons. Surely this is exactly why the "portal" shouldn't do this either? Why not work towards fixing the security issues of the iframe? Regarding pre-loading content in links, they could just implement this in the browser if they think it's really that important. This will destroy your mobile data. I really wish they had sat down and discussed this with other browser teams to flesh it out. I think part of this is in getting the jump on other browsers, this really will take a long time to implement securely.

zelpo 8y ago

Nice, this will be depreciated in 6 months

amenod 8y ago

I really, really, really hope this is never supported by other browsers.

JoshMnem 8y ago

It's going to hurt small sites the most, because sources of traffic like Google, Facebook, and other large sites will eventually stop linking to websites, and load them as previews in frames ("portals") instead. "No other browser vendor has expressed interest in supporting the Portals" -- but Google is releasing it in Chrome anyway. It changes the fundamental nature of the WWW as linked documents. Embrace, Extend, Extinguish. The only conclusion I can come to about things like AMP and portals is that Google is actively trying to kill the Web. > "Google engineers hope that their new Portals technology will take over the web and become the standard way in which websites transition between links."

superkuh 8y ago
> sources of traffic like Google, Facebook, and other large sites will eventually stop linking to websites, and load them as previews in frames ("portals") instead. That's already happening to an extent with local AMP caches of outbound links 3rd party links on AMP enabled pages at cloudflare.
keiru 8y ago
In what way loading a site on a portal would be different to loading it on the main window? Portals sound like just a technical UX solution, but would still count as site traffic.
- JoshMnem 8y ago
  It looks like a way to sort-of link to a site, but to make the default action to return back to the linking site instead of going deeper into the other site. You aren't sending people to the target page, but are just loading a preview. As the target website, even if your analytics show a visit, it might not be a full visit. 15 years ago, it was common for website owners to ask you to "make all links open in a frame" so that the original site could keep a frame on top of all the other content. That was probably only stopped by JavaScript snippets to break out of frames. Portals is the same kind of idea -- give power to the sites that link out (like Google) at the expense of the smaller sites that receive links.
- 8y ago

rangerpolitic 8y ago

I am growing increasingly annoyed with "user experience." It's becoming a catchall excuse for Google and others to inject all kinds of crap that no one wants.

skybrian 8y ago

The idea seems to be able to show a preview of a page, then navigate into it if the user chooses, without reloading it. Here is an explainer: https://github.com/WICG/portals/blob/master/explainer.md https://github.com/WICG/portals/blob/master/explainer.md

thefounder 8y ago

This seems designed to stop people leaving Google search/news

option_greek 8y ago

>https://github.com/WICG/portals/blob/master/explainer.md https://github.com/WICG/portals/blob/master/explainer.md >This is a proposal for enabling seamless navigations between sites or pages. In particular, this proposal enables a page to show another page as an inset and perform a seamless transition between an inset state and a navigated state. Like clicking on an ad ?

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

jeena 8y ago

Interesting that nowadays Google is launching HTML elements.

Jtsummers 8y ago

> Google launched a new technology called Portals How is an HTML tag a technology?

hn23 8y ago

Google is really becoming the MS of these days... "This page is optimized for Chrome."

_bxg1 8y ago

Welcome to a world in which "web standards" are just everyone else trying to keep in step with whatever Google launched this week.

prepend 8y ago

“Google says portals allow users to navigate inside the content they are embedding --something that iframes do not allow for security reasons.” I love how they gloss over the security issue here. This is the equivalent of “we made a new Ajax that can call from different domains.” Reading through the article, I don’t see the security restriction addressed at all. I expect that this gets worked on when google submits this to the w3c to be made part of html.

mshockwave 8y ago
that's also my first impression of this article. but i (hope) believe google is aware of this security concern, otherwise they'll probably be the next Microsoft
- m1sta_ 8y ago
  Google search is Windows?
burtonator2011 8y ago
My expectation is that you could only do this for the same domain.
- ChrisSD 8y ago
  If that is true, how would that interact with signed exchanges[0]? [0] https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2018/11/signed-exchanges https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2018/11/signed-exc...
- stevens32 8y ago
  Looks like that's not the case based on the blog post linked in the article https://web.dev/hands-on-portals/ https://web.dev/hands-on-portals/
dillondoyle 8y ago
It says that it only allows postMessage for cross domain communication. BUT I'm concerned it doesn't mention similar sandbox and feature policies as iFrame. It also mentions that it will allow the 'child' to know if it's inside a portal with window.portalHost but at least this github mentions you can minimally declare no-referrer https://github.com/web-platform-tests/wpt/blob/master/portals/portals-no-referrer.html https://github.com/web-platform-tests/wpt/blob/master/portal... Wouldn't the concern be ads ( I assume this is what this feature is intended for especially on mobile )? If there are no similar restrictions as a iframe safeFrame I can see a ton of ad scams that take advantage...

founderling 8y ago

I would be surprised if Google would allow to "link" to their page by putting it in a portal tag. Just like they don't allow putting their pages in iframes: https://jsfiddle.net/yea0jvxL/ https://jsfiddle.net/yea0jvxL/ But I would not be surprised if they put all search results in portal links and therefore keep all users on their site.

yellowapple 8y ago

Embrace -> [Extend] -> Extinguish Now that Chrome is quickly becoming (if not has outright become) the new Internet Explorer, I wonder what browser will come out in a few years to be the next Chrome?

jpalomaki 8y ago

Reminds me of the old Google Caja project. ”The Caja Compiler is a tool for making third party HTML, CSS and JavaScript safe to embed in your website. It enables rich interaction between the embedding page and the embedded applications.” https://developers.google.com/caja/#benefits-of-using-caja https://developers.google.com/caja/#benefits-of-using-caja

kerng 8y ago

Google indeed is the new Internet Explorer with adding these random, of course standardized and open features.

vernie 8y ago

AMP is fast, yes. Everything else about it fucking sucks.

ConcernedCoder 8y ago

Oh! I'm sure that won't be exploited by hackers... thanks google.

ivarv 8y ago

Throwback to 2003! At first glance this seems _very_ reminiscent of the Java Portlet standard - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Java_Portlet_Specification https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Java_Portlet_Specification

leshokunin 8y ago

Great. This looks like another feature for AMP, but disguis.. I mean packaged as something generic. I’m really not fond of how Google is driving AMP as the go-to way to get better visibility on Google. This is going to introduce more headaches and very little to no upside. I don’t understand why they keep building things without talking to the user. There are other users than Google developers out there, and very little demand for AMP.

lol768 8y ago

It's not in the list here https://mozilla.github.io/standards-positions/ https://mozilla.github.io/standards-positions/ and the spec (https://wicg.github.io/portals/#the-portal-element https://wicg.github.io/portals/#the-portal-element) is written solely by folks at Google and doesn't appear to be an actual W3C spec. Why should anybody care about this until it's standardised and implemented by more than one browser vendor? To talk of a browser vendor "launching" a new element is also ridiculous - Google have no authority to "launch" an element for the web as if it were some product they decided to update. Article title is poor in this respect. Looking at the actual spec: > This specification extends [HTML] to define a new kind of top-level browsing context, which can be embedded in another document, and a mechanism for replacing the contents of another top-level browsing context with the previously embedded context. 1) Why not an iframe? 2) Why not a link to the iframe src? Or is the link here from within the iframe? Surely that's possible already with a postMessage and a window.location change. I don't understand the benefits here. Is the sole purpose of this to avoid a HTTP request?

p4bl0 8y ago
I agree with most of your comment. However, I don't think the claim that Google is launching a new element is ridiculous (even if I'm sad about it). That's more or less how it worked during the IE vs Netscape war. Remember those fancy <marquee> and <blink> tags for example. Standardization came second.

EastSmith 8y ago

Looks to me as an effort to make any user visiting google.com to not actually leave google.com FOREVER. Users will get portal-ed to a result page (with the browser's url bar showing foo.com, instead of google.com), but the user will be tracked the entire time from google, since they would be still on google.com.

dual_basis 8y ago
"Don't be evil" is now well in the rear view mirror.
- amingilani 8y ago
  How? I understand that you're expressing a sentiment, but why do you think it's relevant here?
dillondoyle 8y ago
Feels more like a way to recreate FB's in-app 'Instant Experience' - especially given the example videos are mobile and look very similar UI. I can see a lot of value in serving a mobile ad, and then having clicks open this overlay experience which was pre-loaded.
zavi 8y ago
If mywebsite.com embeds the portal for othersite.com, and user navigates into it, is there a way for mywebsite.com to keep tracking user interactions inside othersite.com?
- coolspot 8y ago
  No, after you navigated to the portal page it is like you have clicked a link - whole browser context is replaced with portal's.
ne01 8y ago
I'm so happy that duckduckgo.com is getting better and better over time. I tried to use it for a month 2 years ago and switched back to Google. Now it has been 3 months and I don't notice -- which is a very good thing!

bluepnume 8y ago

I wrote a quick article on the differences between portals and iframes: https://medium.com/@bluepnume/google-chromes-portals-like-iframes-but-better-and-worse-29e0bbb3f78e https://medium.com/@bluepnume/google-chromes-portals-like-if...

busymom0 8y ago

I honestly don't see the point of this unless it gets widely adopted by other browsers (which is an obvious point). Mobile is already a huge market and on iOS at least, even chrome and safari simply use the iOS built in WKWebView with a UI wrapper around it. So unless Apple decides to include <portal>, wouldn't this not work on any iOS browsers? I also use Android but don't use Chrome due to it's lack of extension and content blocker support. So other browsers on Android will also need to adopt this.

partiallypro 8y ago

I don't know why anyone would truly adopt this. It's very Google centric and didn't have any major benefits outside YouTube ad sales.

Liron 8y ago

So many snarky comments here. Chill. Portal is just an iFrame that has the ability to smoothly transition itself into being the top-level URL while maintaining its inner state.

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cromwellian 8y ago

The headline is wrong, nothing was 'launched', rather, an experimental feature was added to chrome://flags, just like the gazillions of other features that are hidden behind flags until they are standardized and shipped.

antibland 8y ago

The best-case scenario for the future health of the web is for Mozilla to resist supporting <portal>, which will hopefully dissuade companies from adding this element to their products.

makecheck 8y ago

A substantial amount of browsing is now done on battery and expensive data plans so “no thanks” to all these preload-100-things technologies. Just waste, multiplied by more waste.

ilaksh 8y ago

Is Firefox going to implement it? Seems like a lot of pressure on that team to ensure it makes sense. And if they find a reason not to implement it they may be really screwed because of the control Google has.

sexyflanders 8y ago

Annnd thats why I don't run chrome

jonathankoren 8y ago

This isn’t a W3C element, correct? So it’s Microsoft’s embrace and extend strategy.

yason 8y ago

I think things started to go more or less downhill since HTML 2.0. For the kind of web browsing I'm used to value text and images go a long way and they don't really allow for anything too intrusive. There were tons of interesting sites online in the 90's and basically none of them were bad because they were missing some essential interactive page/UI elements. Most of them were near-instant already at the time if you had something better than a modem connection. Things could've gone heavenly if the nerds who built that only weren't a minority. At least we still have text terminals and ssh...