Compatibility/Meetings/2016-05-10

Minutes

Updates on the status of this in Firefox.

miketaylr: We gonna have this at some point in the near future, the question is to wonder what we should do with it. What are the API methods we want? What are the use cases we want to solve? (And then later, what API do we want to expose).
karl: Hallvord, do you remember what were the main problems (things that weren't practical) with browser.js in Opera?
hallvord: In my opinion the User JS API was a good choice.There were some limitations, for example rich text stuff because the scripts couldn't run inside about:blank. That led to some weird race conditions.
karl: With browser.js, was it possible to target only one page? Some times you don't want to target just a single domain, but just a single page.
hallvord: You can target a page, but only at the point when you're running JS, not at the HTTP level.
mike: If we want that, I feel like we could probably do it using XPCOM.
karl: One case I've met a few times, there are sites that are using UA sniffing to fix a set of properties either in localStorage or in cookies. Once these properties are set, the user agent doesn't matter anymore. The issue is once you do UA overrides, you disappear from stats. On the other hand, if we can set those props and then become again Firefox, this would solve that.
TODO: Mike, start an email thread about browser.js like.