Pong using browser windows as the paddles and ball (2009) | Hacker News Reader

Pong using browser windows as the paddles and ball (2009)

stewd.io

67 pointsjstrieb19 comments

I became a huge fan of this when I first saw it and ended up making a similar "Bricks breaker" game, inspired by this, that uses popups too:

https://creatorrr.github.io/browser-bricks

P.s. The source code has a letter in it (http://stewd.io/pong/lib/pong.js)

Good comments, too!

  //  Wow. I had no idea JavaScript keyCodes differ from ASCII.
  //  They ignore case (both 'A' and 'a' will return 65)
  //  but differentiate between regular number and numeric keypad!

I love that letter. Totally stealing that idea. I can't say I haven't run F12 on any site I frequent, it's always been fun.

I love that I can resize the paddle for an advantage. ;)

Yeah, that other opponent is pretty strong too. I just closed the other guy's paddle and was able to score fairly easily

Very cool. I didn't know websites had that kind of control over pop-up placement.

It gets quite confused with multi-monitor setups, though. I had to disconnect all but one display to be able to play. The paddles appeared on one display and the ball on another. The ball also only moved vertically.

Porn sites etc used to use pop-unders!

Aww ffs why is this even possible? Why can JS control window positioning and size?

It seems we are all of a sudden able to make those popup bombs from the 90s internet again?

The good old times when you could execute an antivirus from a website and it would scan all files of your local disk. Thanks to ActiveX.

Windows Update itself was a browser app. You could upgrade from the browser.

If we had known better, we would have made people upgrade from Windows to Linux this way, and Microsoft would have closed the giant hole faster.

ActiveX was always signed, like regular binaries - if MS's Windows signing key leaks they probably have bigger problems.

ActiveX needed to be registered[1] to execute. It didn't have to be signed though. This was true even within Internet Explorer (or "Internet Exploiter" as I affectionately called it at that time).

[1] https://www.c-sharpcorner.com/UploadFile/8911c4/how-to-regis...

> Windows Update itself was a browser app. You could upgrade from the browser.

I'm very interested in this. Would you mind expanding, please?

I remember how Windows ME, 2000, and XP had an ActiveX in Internet Explorer to select what updates to download and install in a web page, and if i recall correctly, it was called Microsoft Update. That download and installation process were done in other process outside the browser.

For me this process was a total pain in the back, because it was pretty common to have failed downloads, specially when you used dial-up internet connections.

It never ceases to amaze me just how bad Microsoft Update and Windows Update are (and the macOS App Store too for that matter). Two of the biggest companies in the world can't seem to get it right while a team of volunteers manage to run not just OS updates on Linux and BSD, but an entire library of software too.

1. This is from 2009

2. I had to explicitly allow pop-ups when I clicked on this

A website can only control popups it opened I think, not the main window for example. It actually may be useful in some contexts, but should probably be throttled by the browser, like not more than 1 changes every 5 sec, because it can be also used in a very annoying way. As usual anyway.

Doom next?

doesnt work for me anyone got a video

Press play three times, didnt work for me either.

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