MSEdgeExplainers VS standards-positions

The spec is a W3C CSS working group draft: https://drafts.csswg.org/css-anchor-position-1/

It looks like less of a Chrome thing and more of an Edge thing? The Intent to Prototype [1] links to an Edge explainer [2] with Microsoft authors. It doesn't look like anyone has asked Mozilla for a position yet [3] but I expect if they get positive signals from web developers (us!) that will be soon.

[1] https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/g/blink-dev/c/vsPdd...

[2] https://github.com/MicrosoftEdge/MSEdgeExplainers/blob/main/...

[3] https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/issues?q=anch...

Read the explainer here

You can learn more about Focus Mode in this Edge explainer document.

For a spec about a browser feature, "getting it" can mean a few different things.

1. Understanding the purpose of the feature ("why/when would I use this?")

2. Understanding how to implement the feature

3. Understanding how to use the feature

4. Understanding the feature's "corner cases" (surprising implications, cases where it doesn't do what you'd expect, etc.)

5. Understanding why the feature works the way it does (instead of some other way)

Most of the web specs really only explain how to implement a feature, and even then, they're not great at that, because they do such a poor job at explaining the purpose of the feature.

Assuming that you, like most of us, aren't working on implementing a browser, that means that web specs are mostly unhelpful to you. It's almost completely beyond the purpose of a spec to teach you how to use a feature, what its corner cases would be (which are often unknown at the time a spec was written), and why the specification says what it says.

This is an area where the web spec community has made some improvements in recent years. Nowadays, it's understood that new proposed specifications shouldn't just provide a specification, but also a separate "explainer" document, whose purpose is to communicate #1 (the purpose of the feature), and also persuade the other browser vendors to implement the feature. ("This will be really cool, and here's why…")

At a minimum, specs nowadays often include a non-normative "Motivation" section, as the CSS Nesting spec does. https://www.w3.org/TR/css-nesting-1/ I you'll find that you can "get" that spec much better than you can the CSS OM spec https://www.w3.org/TR/cssom-1/ which is old enough to buy alcohol and doesn't include a "Motivation" section.

You can often find explainer docs linked off of https://chromestatus.com/ e.g. https://github.com/MicrosoftEdge/MSEdgeExplainers/blob/main/... I think you'll find that explainers are 10000% better for learning features than specs are. (They typically even discuss #3, #4, and #5, as they typically discuss alternative rejected approaches.)

Transparent ads are enabled through ad providers joining the Transparent Ads Provider program. More info on the program and the requirements for providers here - https://github.com/MicrosoftEdge/MSEdgeExplainers/blob/main/TransparentAds/Program-Overview.md

Not necessarily for a Swift project, but your experience makes me wonder about the current web API for highlighting spans of text.

https://github.com/MicrosoftEdge/MSEdgeExplainers/blob/main/...

Complicated...

You can read through the conversations to understand more of the context

https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/issues/100#is...

https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/issues/95#iss...

https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/issues/336

The main struggle is around giving informed consent that explains the risks. Understandably, browsers don't want to ship a "Set my printer on fire" button.

You can check why Mozilla and Apple have opted to not support this.

https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/issues/154

https://github.com/WebKit/standards-positions/issues/28

Neither Mozilla or Webkit are satisfied that the proposal is safe by default, and contains footguns for the user that can be pretty destructive.

FWIW Mozilla updated their position on Web Serial API to "neutral" and clarified that they might be okay with enabling the API with an add-on.

https://mozilla.github.io/standards-positions/#webserial

Allowing serial but not HID would be really strange. With HID you get standard identifiers that let you filter out devices that are too dangerous for the web. With serial you get nothing. Even if you know a device is dangerous, there's no way to protect users from it.

Hasn't FireFox been dragging their asses on @scope? https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/issues/472

It took years to just convince them of the need for it. And I'm not sure anyone got convinced vs Chrome had already shipped it and Safari has it planned so they caved in.

Hard to believe FireFox used to be a leader of the modern web.

As mentioned by others, OK idea, but not a fan that this isn't standardized. After a quick search+peruse, these seem to indicate that it's not around the corner either. Happy (/hope) to be corrected.

https://github.com/whatwg/html/issues/4180

https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/issues/990

Mozilla's position on these specs is nicely outlined publicly and transparently as part of their standards-positions project: https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/issues/100

I'm kinda glad it's not implemented in my browser, to be honest, because the whole thing seems like a security nightmare.

It's a shame it impacts some hobby usecases, but I don't think this outweighs the reasoning set out on the GitHub issue.

This should have big warnings on it. Some of these are not web standards; they are features implemented unilaterally by Google in Blink that have been explicitly rejected by both Mozilla and Apple on privacy and security grounds.

Take Web Bluetooth, for example:

Mozilla:

> This model is unsustainable and presents a significant risk to users and their devices.

— https://mozilla.github.io/standards-positions/#web-bluetooth

Apple:

> Here are some examples of features we have decided to not yet implement due to fingerprinting, security, and other concerns, and where we do not yet see a path to resolving those concerns

— https://webkit.org/tracking-prevention/

This is Microsoft’s Embrace, Extend, and Extinguish bullshit applied to the web platform by Google. Google keeps implementing these things despite all other major rendering engines rejecting them, convinces people that they are part of the web, resulting in sites like this, then people start asking why Firefox and Safari are “missing functionality”. These are not part of the web platform, they are Google APIs that have been explicitly rejected.

Is BLE a PWA requirement? I think they explained their position pretty well here, regardless of whether I agree:

https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/issues/95#iss...

I took a glance at Can I Use what the difference between the last public release of Firefox and Chrome is [1] and they don't really have that big of a difference in the eyes of normal use-cases? Some of these aren't implemented purely because of privacy reasons, the proposals aren't finished yet or complexity [2].

Why would Firefox need to change to Chromium engine? The only websites I notice that don't work with Firefox is because of user-agent targetting or just putting 5-second time-outs in Youtube code on non-chrome webbrowsers [3].

Can you give some examples of websites not working on Firefox?

[1] https://caniuse.com/?compare=chrome+120%2Cfirefox+121&compar...

[2] https://mozilla.github.io/standards-positions/

[3] https://www.neowin.net/news/youtube-seemingly-intentionally-...