Posted by Richard Cornford on 08/28/06 14:02

kaston3 wrote:
> So it seems that in their unduly extreme crusade to fight
> phising, spyware and thousand of enemies

"Unduly extreme"? Isn't making it impossible for the malicious to do
what they should never have been allowed to do in the first place a
sensible action?

> MS IE 7 designers have decided not to let designers open
> popups without the address/location toolbar.
<snip>

Increasingly restricting the ability of scripts to dictate the form of
their windows has been the trend in web browsers for more than half a
decade.

> This is really very bad news.

Bad news for who? I have never written a script that has any interest in
whether a browser window shows a location bar or not, so from my point
of view nothing has changed.

> Many game, photo and style sites rely on no-bars-at-all
> pop-ups to display info elegantly

A mistake is not any less a mistake as a result of many people making
it. If some designers have kept their heads buried in the sand for the
last half decade, not seen that their control over new window features
(and even the new windows themselves) has been increasingly restricted,
not understood the reason for this trend, or denied its significance for
some "majority" of browser users, then they may have created designs
predicated upon poor/false assumptions and consequently fragile.

> without any ugly html code trace.

I have no idea what that is supposed to refer to.

> Can anybody confirm if this is final since I am working
> with the latest IE7 candidate release??

The historical trend is that any browser feature that is subject to
abuse by (any) script authors will be increasingly restricted over time
(if not actually removed).

> Is there any way around this monstruosity by Redmon
> designers who happen to add this one to IE7 top bars and
> icon distribution ugliness?

There is no need for any "way around" anything as the inherent
unreliability of attempting to open new browser windows has long since
made that an inappropriate action in browser script design. Alternative
approaches to the prevention of the types of content commonly placed in
pop-up windows avoid the issues of pop-up windows entirely.

Richard.

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