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Comment by phamilton | Hacker News Reader

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phamilton

For anyone interested in the definition of "essential", see the source code:

https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src.git/+/master/... (See constants)

and

https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src.git/+/master/... (See ShouldThrottleContent)

TLDR, essential content is either:

1) On the same domain as the page

2) Considered "Large" (at least 298 x 398, certain aspect ratio, minimum total area), with an exception for tiny content (likely transport plugins).

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The only other regular 'tiny content' thing I can think of is ZeroClipboard (which puts an invisible flash movie over a button so you can click 'copy') as Javascript clipboard actions still aren't broadly supported [2].

ZeroClipboard is used by Github and lots of other sites for the little buttons next to repo URLs, etc.

1 - https://github.com/zeroclipboard/zeroclipboard 2 - http://caniuse.com/#search=clipboard

My favorite workaround to this is Trello, where the "keydown" event on CTRL selects some hidden text, so then if the user then hits C (still holding CTRL), the desired text is copied to the clipboard.

EDIT: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6152501

Github somehow manages to copy stuff to the clipboard with flash player disabled - apparently it's using the new HTML5 clipboard API.

IIRC ZeroClipboard falls back to flash if you're not using a browser with the new clipboard APIs.

But this problem is irrelevant, since all versions of Chrome that block flash will have this API, not?

But that's irrelevent anyway, as Chrome wouldn't block ~tiny~ flash plugins used by the clipboard transport.

ZeroClipboard doesn't use the HTML5 clipboard APIs yet, but there is an open issue:

https://github.com/zeroclipboard/zeroclipboard/issues/171

It may be using both.

Some file uploaders have a tiny flash backup today - and some of the ones from just a few years ago where little more than a button image with a flash backend.

http://caniuse.com/#feat=filereader

https://github.com/zeroclipboard/zeroclipboard/issues/606 Submitted an issue, just in case.

Erm, can I use reports only Android <4.4 and Opera Mini as not supporting it, and in both those cases Flash won't work either.

So why do we need Flash for clipboard actions today?

Because JavaScript doesn't give you the option of programmatically messing with the user's clipboard. The best you can do is present a selected string in a textbox for the user to press Ctrl+C

IIRC socket.io has a flash fallback.

No need for a fallback in Chrome, and it'd be exempted under the tiny transport plugins exemption too.

I hope the result will not be bigger Flash ads :)

Thanks for the sleuthing. I wish more folks here on HN read such parts of source and reported back what they found.

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