Panels for Chrome extensions?

[Sean Anderson]

Hey there,

I'm hoping to start a discussion surrounding chrome panels: chrome://flags/#enable-panels

My understanding is that the Google Hangouts extension is able to display conversations inside of panels without requiring the user to navigate to chrome://flags and enable panels. This information comes from StackOverflow, http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9778098/having-panel-behavior-in-chrome-extension. Apparently, if I wasn't deploying an extension to the web store and didn't mind conflicting with Google Hangouts, I could use their key to enable panels without modifying my flags. Is this correct? If so, is there a timeline for when panels would be introduced to the general public? Or someone I could speak to about having an extension key elevated to the same permissions?

Having panels would really improve the usability of my application, but I think that requiring users to enable a flag will result in the feature not being readily adopted.

Thanks for any information,

Sean 

[Steven Bennetts]

Hi Sean,

Panels in Chrome have been something of an enigma for a long time now. We currently have two completely separate implementations, one on Windows/Mac, and one on Chrome OS. While feedback on panels (specifically for Hangouts) has been generally positive on Chrome OS, it is more mixed on other platforms, and the Hangouts team is actively investigating other options. Because of the mixed feedback and the differences across platforms, we are reluctant to maintain both implementations. Since we don't want to enable panels by default across all platforms, and we would prefer not to enable any feature by default when it is only available on one platform, panels remain in limbo, frustrating as that might be. That said, the "experimental" Hangouts implementation has been stable on Chrome OS for a while now, so perhaps it is time to re-open that discussion.

Cheers,

-Steven

[Sean Anderson]

Hey Steven,

Thanks for the reply! I appreciate it!

That's super interesting that a different implementation is needed for Chrome OS. Are you able to share why feedback would not be as positive on some operating systems? Are they implemented very differently? Additionally, is there Linux support? I (I note that it is pretty common for Linux to be picking up the rear in chrome APIs)

Anyway, I would love for the discussion to be re-opened. If I can be of any service, let me know. I have some experience with working on the Chromium project fixing some bugs.

Additionally, if it's helpful, I can provide my use case. I develop Streamus, currently 7th by rating out of all extensions in the web store. I would really like to continuously display YouTube videos in the foreground. This PIP extension achieves my goal, but I don't think it's acceptable to ask all of my users to enable the panels flag manually. Originally, I had planned to leverage the Rich HTML Desktop Notifications to achieve my goal. Unfortunately, as you probably know, those were dropped from the spec and I've been hungry for a new solution!

If I can help, let me know how! Thanks! 

Cheers,

Sean

[Ben Wells]

Out of interest, have you looked at packaged apps? They would allow you to implement something like panels in your app with frameless wnidows.

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[Steven Bennetts]

In fact, if we do decide to officially support panels, it will only be fore packaged apps, i.e. we will support it in the chrome.app.window API, not the chrome.windows API. 

So switching to a packaged app would be necessary regardless, and as Ben notes you could approximate panel behavior with a packaged app in the meanwhile.

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[Sean Anderson]

Hey there,

Its been a little over 6 months. I'm still working on my extension and would still love to have an alternative to panels. I note that Hangouts still appears to be using panels with special whitelisting so that no flag has to be enabled. Just wondering if there's an update on Google's end regarding the panels enigma.

Thanks!

Sean

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