[webkit-dev] "Magic Iframe" removal proposed

[Geoffrey Garen]

I have no immediate objection to removing the shared iframe feature since, as you say, it's a source of problems, very few apps use it, and no apps require it. It's great that we did this feature through a pre-existing web technology, so we discovered its problems, and can now remove it, without creating a huge API surface area burden along the way.

> On a contrary, 'shared application state' could be a good idea, however this particular way to implement it unfortunately is very difficult to get right. There are no Google applications that use this feature currently, and there is understanding of the costs involved. There is a possibility that some other idea can both address the potential need and be reliably implementable at the same time. Workers, for example, are a good case of limiting the surface that also limits design/maintenance costs. Perhaps something similar can be proposed for shared state. However, there was a discussion in Chromium and it appears that ongoing design and maintenance of magic iframe is not worth the benefit the feature provides for the applications.

This doesn't sound so good to me.

The main problem you identified with shared iframes -- the fact that permissions and live objects are typically associated with a single top-level page, and can get confused in the context of sharing between pages -- sounds like a problem with sharing, and not a problem with iframes as the mechanism for sharing. I don't support "Sharing is hard and nobody uses it, therefore let's add sharing through workers". 

Geoff