[whatwg] Proposal for IsSearchProviderInstalled / AddSearchProvider

[David Levin]

On Fri, Dec 16, 2011 at 3:08 PM, Peter Kasting <pkasting at google.com> wrote:

> >
> > On Tue, 17 May 2011, Bjartur Thorlacius wrote:
> > > Then why add an API when we've already got (IMO superior) declarative
> > > markup?
> >
> > In the case of adding the API to the spec, because it's already
> > implemented. As to why it was added to the browsers, no idea.
>
>
> Certainly there's no declarative markup for IsSearchProviderInstalled().
>  As for AddSearchProvider(), I know one reason it was added to Chrome was
> explicitly to expose the "and make default" functionality.  Of course one
> could argue that a UA could give users the option to make any provider
> default for whatever UI it exposes for the declarative case.  But there are
> a couple fine points worth mentioning: one is that since users rarely want
> to make an engine default, adding that option to the UI all the time would
> be even more annoying than adding "[ ] And set as my homepage" to whatever
> UI is shown for "bookmark this page", and thus UAs may shy away from this
> idea.  Another is that engines may wish to explicitly request to be made
> default in response to some explicit user action on the page, e.g. clicking
> a "Make this my default search engine" button.  Creating this UI and making
> it work smoothly is difficult with the existing mechanisms.
>
> Note that I am not the one who proposed, specced, or implemented this in
> Chrome; I'm just trying to convey a few things that seem apparent to me as
> another Chrome UI engineer :)
>

Just to clarify, it was clear that many including other browsers didn't
suppport the asDefault parameter, and Google Chrome no longer supports it.

dave