[whatwg] Proposal for Links to Unrelated Browsing Contexts

[Charlie Reis]

On Thu, Jun 14, 2012 at 10:45 AM, Charlie Reis <creis at chromium.org> wrote:

> I do observe that Safari, IE, and even Opera currently allow windows in
> unrelated contexts to discover named windows, though.  Just do a
> window.open("foo.html", "foo") from two independently opened windows and
> they'll both target the same "foo" window.  As a result, making unrelated
> browsing contexts inaccessible to each other would probably require changes
> to most user agents.
>
> I'm ok either way: allowing named but unrelated windows to be discovered
> or not.
>
>
>
I'm going to go out on a limb and say that it's ok if named but unrelated
windows are able to discover each other.  This is already the case for
windows in unrelated browsing contexts in most single-process browsers, and
(as Boris points out) it already happens in Chrome when renderer processes
are shared.  That means developers need to handle it anyway.

Thus, this proposal is mainly about preventing window.opener from being set
and causing window.open to return null.  I've updated the wiki to reflect
this (in Benefits and Limitations):
http://wiki.whatwg.org/wiki/Links_to_Unrelated_Browsing_Contexts

If we want to change that behavior and make all window names be specific to
their unit of related browsing contexts (for all user agents), that should
probably be proposed separately.

Charlie