> If this is meant to be vendor-neutral, there needs to be some way for > arbitrary search engines to advertise support for this feature to > supporting browsers. In the experimental Chrome implementation, does > it just not work if the search engine isn't Google? If Bing wanted to > make use of this too, how would they do it? If advertising support is > necessary, then OpenSearch seems like the way to do it.
This is a good point that wasn't in the initial API proposal. The page needs to advertise support for instant. But the decision is more complicated that simply "provider A supports it and provider B doesn't." The Google SERP determines on a case-by-case basis whether instant is supported. For instance, for users with a high RTT time, we don't advertise instant support because it would be a bad experience. The simplest way to address this is probably to advertise support via an agreed upon meta tag. e.g. <meta name="NavigatorSearchBoxSupport" content="true"> The UA populates the API only if the page advertises support via the metatag. Otherwise, it works as it does today. > > But I might be misunderstanding something here, since the proposal > only gave an API, and didn't explain conformance requirements for UAs. > So maybe my inferences from the demo video are wrong. > Yes, the API requires a bit of imagination at this point. I'll write up conformance requirements in more detail, but thought it worthwhile to get high level feedback and gauge interest first.
