Fullscreen Popup Windows

[bradtriebwasser]

Request for Mozilla Position on an Emerging Web Specification

• Specification Title: Fullscreen Popups
• Specification or proposal URL: https://github.com/bradtriebwasser/fullscreen-popup/blob/main/EXPLAINER.md

Introduction

This proposal introduces the ability for web applications to open a fullscreen popup window, without the need for a separate calls to Window.open() and Element.requestFullscreen().

The proposed enhancement would allow web applications to create a fullscreen popup window on a target display from a single user activation. The window placement permission will be required for these capabilities.

Problem and Use Cases

Web applications are limited in the ways that they can Initiate Multi-Screen Experiences across multi-display configurations. Specifically, opening a popup and transitioning the window to fullscreen typically requires two separate user gestures (depending on brower popup blocking settings). This results in a cumbersome user experience for web applications which utilize multiple displays.

Multiple partners and early adopters of the Multi-Screen Window Placement API have specifically requested the ability to show one or more fullscreen popups from a single user gesture, to avoid the user friction entailed with making separate gestures to create each window and make each window fullscreen. For example:

w3c/window-management#7
w3c/window-management#98 (comment)
w3c/window-management#92.

Some basic illustrative examples which may be achieved with this proposal are listed below:

• Video streaming app launches a video directly to fullscreen on a separate display.
• 3D modeling app launches a preview in fullscreen on a separate display.

Proposal

Allow sites with the window-management permission to open a fullscreen window on a specified display from a single user gesture. Scripts calling window.open() to request a popup window could also include a new fullscreen boolean window feature.

Fullscreen popup requests could also include window bounds features (e.g. left, top, width, height), with positions specified relative to the multi-screen origin, to request that the window be made fullscreen on the screen containing those bounds, and also to be used as the popup window bounds after exiting fullscreen.

Example Code

Basic Example:

window.open(url, '_blank', 'popup,fullscreen');

[michaelwasserman]

Chromium is no longer pursuing this feature directly; see the superseding Request for Position in Issue #1020.

[martinthomson]

Thanks @michaelwasserman, we'll just close this then.