From: Drew Wilson
Sent: Wednesday, July 29, 2009 11:56 AM
On Wed, Jul 29, 2009 at 6:32 AM, Michael Kozakewich
<[email protected]> wrote:
-- Notifications: I don't think I've ever had Outlook notify me of new mail
when it's not running. It usually starts up with Windows, and it runs in the
background. If you turn it off from the tray, it stops.
The way I've envisioned any of these "persistent running workers/pages"
operating is the browser would have a status bar icon which would allow
background apps to display status, and also give the user the opportunity to
exit the browser or (possibly) close down individual apps. So it's a very
similar situation.
Have you ever used Chrome's 'Create Application Shortcuts...'? It's pretty neat
how they work. You get a mini UI with an option button (also the favicon), the
title, and the mimize/maximize/close buttons. The rest is the site itself. It's
actually a modified browser tab, but you'd never know it just by looking at it.
I can close Chrome, and that one modified tab with Google Reader will still be
open. I've sized it to fit in a specific part of my desktop, so it's really
completely separate from the browser (except that, if you look in Task Manager,
the main browser process remains open, invisibly, in the background). It even
keeps my sizing and positioning preferences, so it'll open in the same place
next time I open it. I've got a shortcut to it on my Quick Launch bar, set to a
fancy 'Web 2.0' RSS icon. Every once in a while, I can glance to the title of
the 'application' or my Taskbar, and the number of new feeds is auto-updated
right there. I don't think it can pop up a notification, yet, but I'd love it
to play a sound when it finds more feeds.
If you want, you can also click the favicon (or right click on its taskbar
button) and select "Show as Tab" from the menu, then drag that into the browser
with the rest of your tabs.
The salient bits:
-Browser interface is gone: lets the page have its own navigation/toolbars.
-In the background is a hidden process, which writes the DOM and keeps the
window open.
-That background process isn't a hidden page, but rather the browser process
itself.
-You can open it with a link, which can starts with Windows if put in the
Startup folder.
-It can be given a custom icon.
The problems:
-No notification messages
-No minimization to the notification area
-95% of the web can't use it without switching browsers.
The solution:
-Get other browsers to adopt certain elements from this
-Get everyone to agree on a notification API
-Allow the option of minimizing to notification area ("Hide window when
minimized").
What I'd like is to hear of anything this doesn't solve. Can invisible pages do
anything that the invisible browser can't? An invisible page controlling a
visible page would still need the browser to be open, so we'd actually have one
less page open if it was just the browser and the page. Browsers could also add
an option where they'd secretly stay on in the background, without being any
less secure than it would be to have your browser sitting open right now.
Is it easier that we ask browser vendors to implement these changes, or to
create the whole hidden-page spec?
