Intent to Implement and Ship: Align behavior of window.external.IsSearchProviderInstalled and window.external.AddSearchProvider with the spec

[Daniel Cheng]

Contact emails dch...@chromium.org Spec https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/obsolete.html#external Summary window.external.IsSearchProviderInstalled and window.external.AddSearchProvider will both be defined as methods that are no-ops to match the spec definition. This was never implemented in Safari. In IE10, these methods are (mostly) no-ops: IsSearchProviderInstalled always returns 2, and AddSearchProvider always returns S_OK. Firefox still implements this, but notes that it may be removed at any time. Motivation AddSearchProvider was previously already removed in https://crbug.com/542487. IsSearchProviderInstalled() is also under the removal threshhold at 0.0028%.

Interoperability risk Firefox: No public signals Edge: Shipped (i.e. these methods were changed into no-ops) Safari: No public signals (this API was never supported) Web developers: No signals Compatibility risk Low. AddSearchProvider()
Ongoing technical constraints None
Will this feature be supported on all six Blink platforms (Windows, Mac, Linux, Chrome OS, Android, and Android WebView)? Yes or no. Yes OWP launch tracking bug https://crbug.com/631325 Link to entry on the Chrome Platform Status https://www.chromestatus.com/features/5672001305837568 Requesting approval to ship? Yes

[TAMURA, Kent]

LGTM1

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TAMURA Kent
Software Engineer, Google

[Dimitri Glazkov]

LGTM2

[Daniel Cheng]

Btw, I forgot to mention in the initial email, but the one thing I'm a bit uncertain about is the mismatch between IE10 and the spec for IsSearchProviderInstalled: the spec says it should be a no-op, but IE10 returns 2. I don't currently have a Win10 machine to test Edge, so I have no idea what Edge does, but I'd assume it probably does the same thing. Are we worried about this from a compat standpoint?

Daniel

[Chris Harrelson]

LGTM3

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[John Abd-El-Malek]

On Tue, Jul 26, 2016 at 8:46 AM, Daniel Cheng <dch...@chromium.org> wrote:

Btw, I forgot to mention in the initial email, but the one thing I'm a bit uncertain about is the mismatch between IE10 and the spec for IsSearchProviderInstalled: the spec says it should be a no-op, but IE10 returns 2. I don't currently have a Win10 machine to test Edge, so I have no idea what Edge does, but I'd assume it probably does the same thing. Are we worried about this from a compat standpoint?

On Windows 10, IE 11 returns 0 always, while Edge returns 2 always.

[Philip Jägenstedt]

Daniel, I take it you'll try making it always return undefined per spec and revisit if that doesn't work out? Unless we have a reason to suspect that some path is less risky, then we should try that path first I think.

[Daniel Cheng]

Yes, that's what the current CL (https://codereview.chromium.org/2177123003/) implements. I don't know how I'd measure "not working out" though. The argument for returning 2 is to try to prevent JS from spamming you set your default search, I guess, though I'm not sure if it's a problem in practice.

I've also asked for clarification on if there was a particular reason for choosing to return undefined rather than "2" to match legacy behavior.

Daniel

[Philip Jägenstedt]

Since the difference is so trivial, I'd say that if you learn of a single site that would have a better user experience by returning 2, then changing the spec to do the same would make sense.

[Joe Medley]

Daniel,

Do you have some doubt about finishing this before the M54 feature freeze?

Joe

[Daniel Cheng]

No. The patch is trivial and landed. The OWP launch bug needs to go through review though (which I'm not entirely sure how to trigger).

Daniel

[Joe Medley]

I'm adding Chrome 54 to the status page.

https://www.chromestatus.com/features/5672001305837568

Joe Medley | Technical Writer, Chrome DevRel | jme...@google.com | 816-678-7195

If an API's not documented it doesn't exist.