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Google launches new “portal” HTML element

zdnet.com

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Re: Google launches new “portal” HTML element

#161

Post by cjhopman »

skybrian wrote: post #132
skymt wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's true that I could be lacking imagination. Because to me the portal proposal reads like it's simply moving the implementation of Google's AMP carousel into the browser in order to solve the address-bar problem. Your suggested use cases aren't terribly convincing, I'm afraid. Zooming UIs are perfectly possible using existing web technology. It would be interesting to have a standard way to embed Twitter/Facebook-s…

Sorry about that, I didn't mean you have little imagination, but rather that any reading of a tech spec requires a bit of imagination. It doesn't seem all that unreasonable for a web page to show a preview if the window size is small enough. You could do that with a media query. And then when it goes full-screen, it would already be loaded and that would just be a resize. This would take cooperation from web sites.

Some other appealing examples:

Embedded youtube videos could support a navigation to the video page where the video just animated from the embed to its in-page position while continuing to play.

Embedded twitter posts could be clicked on to do the same sort of transition. Really this sort of thing applies to all kinds of media embeds.

Amazon ads could do the same sort of transition to the advertised item.

Basically, this could allow multiple different domains to coordinate to get some of the fluidity that you can build on a single page. Ex. you could develop a federated social network of many different providers (or video sharing or whatever) while retaining the UX of interacting with a single thing.

Re: Google launches new “portal” HTML element

#162

Post by Goronmon »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #140
kermitismyhero wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

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.

Yeah, I never understood why people purposefully visit sites full of ads and then complain that the sites they visit are full of ads. It seems like a pretty simple problem to solve. And yet, even among the tech crowd, people seem to struggle with it constantly.

Re: Google launches new “portal” HTML element

#163

Post by int_19h »

jadell wrote: post #53
neilalexander wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

People used to say that about IE6, before Firefox and Chrome came along.

IE6 lost that battle because it stagnated - it wasn't just not keeping up with new standards, it wasn't innovating in general. We don't know if it turned out the way it did, if Microsoft kept proactively extending HTML in new IE versions. But given that this is largely what was happening in the IE/NN mortal combat era that preceded IE dominance, I'd expect "this browser best works in ..." to make a comeback. And, indeed, it's increasingly common to see websites explicitly say that they want Chrome. Especially new Google projects...

Re: Google launches new “portal” HTML element

#165

Post by ChrisSD »

anon1m0us wrote: post #144
bryanlarsen wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or just switch to Firefox on Android and use uBlock Origin or similar.

Firefox on my phone crashes ALL the time. I can't load 3 web pages without it crashing. Is Android doing this on purpose? I just cannot get firefox mobile to work, sadly.

This has not been my experience. I've been using Firefox for a while now with way too many tabs open and I've not encountered a crash. Or at least not one I remember. It could perhaps be some hardware it doesn't work well with? Or maybe it struggles with certain sites that I happen not to visit?

I hadn't heard of Fenix but it seems I'll have to try that soon.

Re: Google launches new “portal” HTML element

#166

Post by ddalex »

Spivak wrote: post #13
parliament32 wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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".

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…

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.

Re: Google launches new “portal” HTML element

#167

Post by mshockwave »

prepend wrote: post #142

“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 t…

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

Re: Google launches new “portal” HTML element

#168

Post by ddalex »

moreira wrote: post #157
news_to_me wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No it isn't. It leads to fragmentation of the platform, and pretty soon you'll start seeing "Works best in Chrome!" tags on websites, because developers are too lazy to implement fallback solutions where (or whatever other proprietary extension) isn't supported.

I already see them all the time, but this time dressed up as “please upgrade to a modern browser. But not Firefox. Not Safari. Definitely not Edge.”

Perhaps Edge. A recent version.

Re: Google launches new “portal” HTML element

#170

Post by r3bl »

joshuamorton wrote: post #95
eterm wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, given chrome's market share other browsers are forced to implement it or people will consider those browsers broken. Google are now where microsoft were when they launched IE6, adding features as they see pleased to support their own products and revenue. Back then the web population was savvy and not so reliant on microsoft that they could jump to firebird/firefox/opera when things got really bad. The modern web…

> The modern web users don't have that option because google are far more dominant now than microsoft ever was. At peak (in ~2003-2005) IE had over 90% of global browser market share. Chrome on desktop has between 60 and 70, and afaik less on mobile, and less in the US. So, no. > That doesn't happen now, OSes "just work" and people aren't changing their browser. Given that chrome doesn't come on any popular desktop O…

> Chrome on desktop has between 60 and 70, and afaik less on mobile, and less in the US. So, no.

No, it has about 60% on both mobile and desktop, not counting the derivatives (like Edge and Opera). Considering that both of those markets grew significantly since IE6 days, that makes Chrome more dominant than IE ever was.

And you seem to assume that an average consumer installs stuff on his own after the OS installation, which is not the case with less tech-savvy people I know. They usually give it to someone a bit more tech-savvy to do post-install tasks, and those always include an installation of a different browser. Every single second-hand computer available in my country's market comes with a cracked version of Windows, MS Office and a different browser. Tech-savvy ones just reinstall the OS, non-tech-savvy ones continue using the defaults — the defaults set up by someone else.

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