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What happened to Chrome's popup confinement feature?
- chimeracoder 14y agoI'd rather block them. I, for one, detest the new trend of every website trying to invent its own windowing manager. "New Compose" is the perfect example of this. I don't want every website creating its own internal windows that I can't move, resize, or control with the same power that my windowing manager (whether via X11, Aqua, or whatever Windows uses) gives me. For me, if a popup is at all useful, I'd rather have it pop up in a separate window (and then I can move it back into a tab easily if I like it. And if it's not useful, just kill it from the onset. (One of my extensions - probably AdBlock - seems to do a good job of determining this, for me).
- aboodman 14y agoHow should the browser determine if the popup is useful or not?
- spellboots 14y agoint isPopupUseful() { return FALSE; // 96% accurate }
- sobering 14y agoI'd say 96% is being a tad conservative.
- scjr 14y agoCouldn't they use something similar to a spam filter?
- nwh 14y agoThey appear to block all popups except those caused by a direct click by the user. I think that's why some websites spam popup windows when you make your first click.
- jfb 14y agoMDI is an abomination on the desktop, and it's no less so in the browser.
- notacoward 14y agoWhat you're referring to is not just MDI. TDI is usually considered a subset of MDI, so tabbed browsers are MDI. Ditto for emacs/vim are MDI, even though they're text, and screen/tmux are MDI wrappers for other programs. Do you have a problem with those too? The problem at hand is not MDI but broken MDI that implements a different interface or context than the top-level desktop. That's a problem regardless of whether the model is SDI, TDI, or other MDI. You seem to hate the overlapping-window "other MDI" model in any context, which is fine but slightly orthogonal.
- jfb 14y agoDo you have a problem with those too? I'm not a big fan, no.
- mikeash 14y agoTabs and the other things you describe are good only as long as you can split stuff out into its own window. Tabbed browsers I've used do this, as does screen. Don't know about the others, as I haven't used them. If tabs were held captive within their original window forever, I'd find them terribly annoying.
- SkyMarshal 14y agoTo nitpick: I've never considered TDI to be a subset of MDI, but rather MDI a superset of SDI and TDI. MDI implies a level of control and configuration not remotely possible with the other two.
- WayneDB 14y agoChrome itself is a multiple document interface. So is every other tabbed interface. So is every other program that allows you to interface with multiple documents.
- dredmorbius 14y agoYou can solve the "New Compose" problem (just freaking revert back to the previous behavior, GMail), without re-enabling the abomination that was browser popups.
- kngspook 14y agoI am not necessarily taking a stance for or against New Compose here, but I am taking the stance that your advice is somewhat near-sighted. Here's a little experiment that demonstrates why: name "Revert to Previous Behavior" modes in any major webapp that has been around more than 6 months after the new behavior was rolled out to everyone.
- creativeembassy 14y agoYou don't have it? It works for me. I'll get a "Pop-up notification blocked" message right next to the star in the address bar. I can click on it and continue to ignore pop-ups, or choose to open them if I need to see them. Pretty much exactly the feature described in the comic. Maybe you have it turned off somehow.
- nollidge 14y agoThe comic describes allowing popups, but confining them to within the tab, then allowing you to drag them out to their own window.
- jordanthoms 14y agoTry the links here: http://www.popuptest.com/goodpopups.html http://www.popuptest.com/goodpopups.html
- jordanthoms 14y agoSo my real gripe is with javascript popups triggered on click - they aren't blocked (which is reasonable since that can break apps), which is why the idea of displaying it only within the tab and not interrupting the user was brilliant. Except chrome doesn't do that anymore! (or maybe it never actually did, I can't remember). "There's no concept of a drive-by pop-up in Chrome. JavaScript has no way to force a pop-up into your world. Pop-ups are scoped to the tab they came from -- and confined there. If it's something you want, though -- just drag it out and it'll be promoted to its own window."
- robryan 14y agoTriggered on click is fine if it is attached to a link element. Triggered on click attached to the document or a container div is the problem.
- Jalevijo 14y agoThis is obviously lies. I don't recall it existing.
- jordanthoms 14y agoIt's such a good idea though, I wish they would implement it!
- evmar 14y ago(I used to work on Chrome.) When we sent the very first Chrome out to reviewers, one reviewer sent back a draft of a review that said Chrome seemed like a nice browser but it had the strange additional feature of popping up ads inside the pages as you browsed. The reviewer was so accustomed to their existing browser simply blocking pop-ups that it didn't occur to them that the pop-ups were caused by the pages they were visiting, and instead thought it was some Chrome monetization strategy! Because of this, the feature was scrapped at the last second. There is still some "constrained window" code left over in Chrome that is still used for e.g. HTTP auth prompts. Because the ports came later, I seem to recall we didn't bother with implementing all the draggy window management stuff on Linux and instead centered a dialog over the page content without the window manager controls. You can search on http://cs.chromium.org http://cs.chromium.org for [constrained_window] to see some of the remaining code.
- jordanthoms 14y agoThis makes me sad... I can remember being excited about this feature from the comics. It seems that case would have been handled by adding popup blocking for automatic popups like chrome has now, and keeping containment for ones which are triggered by clicking a link. Maybe Chrome should just have a (hidden) option to apply the current blocking policy for automatically triggered popups to all popups instead, i.e. they show up in the address bar and you have to click the message to show them. How hard do you think it would be to write a patch for that do you think it'd have a chance of being accepted?
- jokoon 14y agoCan someone explain why some websites I visit still manage to make popups appear ?
- Groxx 14y agopopups triggered directly by a click are allowed, because otherwise you'd break e.g. Facebook login, to pick a major example. Basically every browser does this. Quite a few are probably undesirable still, but otherwise people simply claim the browser is broken for their normal site X and abandon it entirely for a browser that doesn't break site X.
- gcb0 14y agoIt's there on android and i absolutely hate it! each tab can have one popup overlaying it. as annoying for advertising, and useless for sites that depends on popups as they usually require more than one, or require one to stay open when you keep working on the tab (which is inaccessible until you close the popup) why not allow me to open as a new tab, i will never understand.
- k3n 14y agoPerhaps it's 2-fold: 1. if the site requires pop-ups to function, then wouldn't it be handy to have it in front of you? Few apps run this model anymore, but it used to be very prevalent. 2. to highlight the sites that use pop-ups in an underhanded way; by forcing them onto the tab that caused them, hopefully you'd realize the source of the problem. then, complain or quit using that site, indirectly discouraging the use of pop-ups. (although according to a guy above, users actually blamed the ads on Chrome instead).
- bengoodger 14y agoBTW you can see the remnants of the code that supported this feature for popups still in use for things like HTTP Basic Auth dialogs: http://www.pagetutor.com/keeper/http_authentication/index.html http://www.pagetutor.com/keeper/http_authentication/index.ht... The feature went through several iterations. Originally, popups were just shown with their requested size anywhere within the browser window. The idea was that a page could only damage itself by opening popups and not interfere with your window manager state. This was deemed ineffective (sites knowingly do stuff to themselves like this all the time - e.g. overlay divs), so we auto-positioned them at the bottom right and hoped you figure out that their titlebars were stacked down there and would drag them up. Then we made them detach immediately when you clicked them. Then we got the feedback evmar mentions and we just did the boring thing. Personally I find it less discoverable now (and am constantly missing popups) but non-user-gesture generated popups seem relatively rare on the web these days compared to more annoying stuff.
- jordanthoms 14y agoMy main annoyance is that a lot of sites now (knowing that if they create a popup the old way it'll be blocked), now just wait till you click or mouse over something and create the popup then, which chrome then allows (it's not blocked at all). So this means the majority of advertising pop ups on the web are actually not blocked by chrome.
- ckevinc 13y agoThis seems like a great feature, and sadly missing from Chrome. I have thought of two types of insidious activities on sites today, the onclick popup and the confirm on close. The onclick popup can be managed (to a small extent) in Chrome by holding the CTRL key and clicking when you have a sense a popup is coming. It doesn't cover all of them, but if you're familiar with a site's actions, you might catch 70% or more of them. I'm not sure what creates the confirm on close, but I see it on sites that auto play video advertisements (among others). Once you try and close the window/tab - Chrome displays a prompt - requiring you to close the prompt, and then close the tab. Annoying. I thought of one simple idea in Chrome - have a key combination (perhaps CTRL+SHIFT) that we can hold down while clicking on a link or possible popup, that will (a) open the link in a new tab and (b) NOT load the page or any elements. It simply presents an empty page with the url that we could copy or a tab we can close. This would add a measure of control and hopefully doesn't break anything.
- ckevinc 13y agoJust to add to this - the javascript event used to capture leaving the open page seems to be: window.onbeforeunload - it would be great if Chrome was able to disable that function entirely, but it doesn't seems possible.