Adopting an IFRAME

[cananian]

Warning: heavy geek content.

Google recently rolled out a new Gmail feature: if you pop open a new little compose or chat window, and then close your main window, the small child window doesn't go away.

This is a pretty esoteric little tweak, but the underlying functionality is quite profound: in order to make this feature work, the entire

Comments

Doesn't work in 'dev' channel of Chrome?

[ossandcad]

Thanks for the detailed analysis, but would you know if this works in the Dev channel of Chrome specifically 6.0.466.0 dev? If I try to close the Gmail main window with a chat window popped out then I get a message box asking if i want to 'stay' or 'leave' and if i 'leave' then the chat window will be closed. If i do 'leave' then the chat window does close. Would you know if I am doing something wrong?

Re: Doesn't work in 'dev' channel of Chrome?

[cananian]

From the Chrome changelog for 6.0.466.0 it seems that webkit is at revision 62670 (search for "webkit roll" in the changelog). Support for adopting IFRAMEs was added in webkit 53871 according to the bug. So your version of Chrome should certainly include the support.

But I'm not a Google or Gmail engineer. There might be some other reason this isn't working for you - maybe there were problems when they released it, and so they turned the feature off in Gmail until they fix the problem. I don't know. Another mystery! Let me know if you find out anything.

[ext_352101]

The feature doesn't work with chat windows, but it should work with all other tearoffs.