Aaron Boodman wrote:
I encounter sites frequently that want to "pop out" part of their
application free of the page, into a smaller window. For example,
Pandora radio (http://pandora.com) does this. The player starts out
embedded in the normal content area, but users have the option to pop
it out into a smaller, separate window.
One problem with these apps is that they have to shutdown and restart
in the popup window. So if I'm playing a song in Pandora, it loses
tracks of where I am and restarts in the pop out player.
It seems like shared workers could help with this problem. If some
future version of workers had access to the Audio API, the base
pandora.com page would start a shared worker, which would be used to
play the audio. If the user opted to open the "player" in a popup, the
popup would simply obtain a reference to the existing worker. The
music wouldn't have to restart. If the user navigated away from
pandora.com, the popup would keep the worker alive until it was
closed.
I think that example could be solved simpler actually. An <audio>
element can be moved between two documents without requiring any
interference in its functionality. So if pandora used an <audio> to play
music they could easily transfer the playing to another window.
Ideally this would also work with plugins, However for various reasons
this is very hard without modifying NPAPI.
/ Jonas
