Hacker News Reader

Comment by sheept | Hacker News Reader

There's several web APIs for browser window positioning, like screenX/Y[0] (which is what OP uses), which allows for those classic pop-up based browser games from over a decade ago, like Browser Ball.[1]

[0]: demo: https://mdn.github.io/dom-examples/screenleft-screentop/

[1]: https://romanbaiocco.github.io/browser-ball-reloaded/

View on HN

For this to work, the browser itself would have to know where its window is placed on the screen. Not all platforms provide such information.

While providing this information to websites without user permission is probably a longstanding mistake of web browsers, windowing systems withholding proper on-screen positioning from native applications is a bug in that system - a bad one.

Why? The window and its position shouldn't matter to the app.

My tiling window manager doesn't care what your snowflake app thinks it wants, and I don't either.

Then continue to enjoy your broken popup menus and combo box drop downs, for starters.

All apps I use are well behaved and work to the relationship that the window they are given.

I'm trying to think of any that try to fight the interface quite as much as this.

Are these broken popup menus and combo box dropdowns with us in the room right now?

Yes, some things in some complex applications can break, but there are solutions and, practically, these particular things you listed simply aren't among those that break.

For example, the VS Code menu bar is broken because the drop-downs clip against the window frame, not the screen edges. The reason is different in this case, though (electron).

GNOME Files (nautilus) made the file property dialog a modal because they really want it to be centered relative to the file browser window and wayland didn't let them position or obtain coordinates.

The result is that you can't open open two file property dialogs at once (to compare sizes or dates or any other meta data, it's a common thing one might want to do).

Hopefully you'd agree that Wayland should allow apps to position windows relative to their own windows, at the very least.

With Dolphin file manager on Wayland this works for me as expected, a new window opens in the centre of the file browser window, no matter the size or position of the window. I didn't do any actual testing but I wonder what the difference is.

Making the pop-ups model has nothing to do with windows not knowing their position on screen.

It's a design choice.

It's not "my broken popup menus" since I'm not writing your app. This is some of the most basic portable software 101 I can't believe a real developer would complain about it.

If you do have that attitude there are a million other OOP style things to throw out for speed and correctness before virtual monitors and coordinating compositors

The its only fair that complex applications don't care about how well they work under your snowflake WM either.

Complex applications work fine.

You are literally replying to a thread that has an example of a game where the position of the window matters.

It was a cute stunt, and it's fine for it to stop working so that sites stop misbehaving.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com