JOjoonehur·Mar 11, 2026Submission
Explainer: Drag Multiple Virtual Files Out of Browser
2 points · Open discussionMicrosoftEdge
MSEdgeExplainers
HTML2019–2026
MicrosoftEdge / MSEdgeExplainers
MSEdgeExplainers
Home for explainer documents originated by the Microsoft Edge team
15Distinct people
16Mentions
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Home for explainer documents originated by the Microsoft Edge team
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This week on Hacker News
Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 1:49:46 PM UTC.
No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.
Mentions over time
HN mentions by year16 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2019-05-09 14:10:15 UTC to 2026-03-11 21:34:01 UTC.
* An incomplete calendar period is marked with an outlined bar. Its count is not directly comparable with a full period.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2019 | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2020 | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 3 | 2 | 1 |
| 2021 | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 3 | 1 | 2 |
| 2022 | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2023 | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 1 | 1 |
| 2024 | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2025 | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 3 | 2 | 1 |
| 2026 (partial) | 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 3 | 1 | 2 |
What Hacker News says
16 sourcesFor Apple, sure. But Google has been leading efforts to make the PWA experience good. In origin trial right now is the ability for websites to install PWAs: https://github.com/MicrosoftEdge/MSEdgeExplainers/blob/main/....
This would make it much easier to find and install web apps than the current method.
In Apple to soon take up to 30% cut from all Patreon creators in iOS app> "Has PWA become popular on unencumbered platforms like Android or Windows? No."
Yes, PWAs have become popular on these platforms. I work for Microsoft on the Microsoft Store (app store on Windows) and I work with the Edge team, and I work on PWABuilder.com, which publishes PWAs to app stores. Some of the most popular apps in the Microsoft Store are PWAs: Netflix, TikTok, Adobe Creative Cloud, Disney+, and many others.
To view the list of PWAs in the Store, on a Windows box you can run ms-windows-store://assoc/?Tags=AppExtension-microsoft.store.edgePWA
I run PWABuilder.com as well, and I can tell you that many, many PWAs get published to the Google Play Store, including some very popular ones.
I agree there is some confusion around PWA installation. There are some proposed web standards with Google and Microsoft's backing to help with th
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at, e.g. Web Install: https://github.com/MicrosoftEdge/MSEdgeExplainers/blob/main/...
Opt-In Event Phases for Reliably Fast DOM Operations
1 points · Open discussionThere is a proposal to add support for this:
https://github.com/MicrosoftEdge/MSEdgeExplainers/blob/main/...
In Show HN: OverType – A Markdown WYSIWYG editor that's just a textareaThe spec is a W3C CSS working group draft: https://drafts.csswg.org/css-anchor-position-1/
It looks like less of a Chrome thing and more of an Edge thing? The Intent to Prototype [1] links to an Edge explainer [2] with Microsoft authors. It doesn't look like anyone has asked Mozilla for a position yet [3] but I expect if they get positive signals from web developers (us!) that will be soon.
[1] https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/g/blink-dev/c/vsPdd...
[2] https://github.com/MicrosoftEdge/MSEdgeExplainers/blob/main/...
[3] https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/issues?q=anch...
In Tether elements to each other with CSS anchor positioningFor a spec about a browser feature, "getting it" can mean a few different things.
1. Understanding the purpose of the feature ("why/when would I use this?")
2. Understanding how to implement the feature
3. Understanding how to use the feature
4. Understanding the feature's "corner cases" (surprising implications, cases where it doesn't do what you'd expect, etc.)
5. Understanding why the feature works the way it does (instead of some other way)
Most of the web specs really only explain how to implement a feature, and even then, they're not great at that, because they do such a poor job at explaining the purpose of the feature.
Assuming that you, like most of us, aren't working on implementing a browser, that means that web specs are mostly unhelpful to you. It's almost completely beyond the purpose of a spec to teach you how to use a feat
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ure, what its corner cases would be (which are often unknown at the time a spec was written), and why the specification says what it says.
This is an area where the web spec community has made some improvements in recent years. Nowadays, it's understood that new proposed specifications shouldn't just provide a specification, but also a separate "explainer" document to explain the purpose of the feature, and also persuade the other browser vendors to implement the feature. ("This will be really cool, and here's why…")
At a minimum, specs nowadays often include a non-normative "Motivation" section, as the CSS Nesting spec does. https://www.w3.org/TR/css-nesting-1/ I you'll find that you can "get" that spec much better than you can the CSS OM spec https://www.w3.org/TR/cssom-1/ which is old enough to buy alcohol and doesn't include a "Motivation" section.
You can often find explainer docs linked off of https://chromestatus.com/ e.g. https://github.com/MicrosoftEdge/MSEdgeExplainers/blob/main/... I think you'll find that explainers are 10000% better for learning features than specs are. (They typically even discuss #3, #4, and #5, as they typically discuss alternative rejected approaches.)
Not necessarily for a Swift project, but your experience makes me wonder about the current web API for highlighting spans of text.
https://github.com/MicrosoftEdge/MSEdgeExplainers/blob/main/...
Complicated...
In The strangely difficult problem of drawing a box around textMicrosoft proposes a standard of adding app changelog to Webmanifest
17 points · Open discussionWe're halfway there with the URL Protocol handler part in Web Application manifest specification (that currently only supports protocols, not websites).
https://github.com/MicrosoftEdge/MSEdgeExplainers/blob/main/...
In Let web applications be file handlersOne way web components can evolve to help this is with declarative custom elements, a feature many of the people who've worked on web components have wanted to pursue.
The idea is that you could define a custom element, with style and DOM encapsulation, purely in markup with either no script at all, or script only for progressive enhancement.
There are still a few features that need to be finalized and proposed, like Template Instantiation [1] to allow for expressions in HTML. When put together it would look something like this:
<custom-element name="x-summary" attributes="href">
<template>
<style>
::slotted(h1) { color: blue; }
</style>
<article>
<a href="{{ href }}"><slot name="title"</a>
<slot></slot>
</article>
</template>
</custom-element>
Which you ca
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n then use like:
<x-summary href="http://...">
<h1 slot="title">Hello</h1>
<p>This article is about...</p>
</x-summary>
Combine this with HTML modules[2] so you can import these definitions and you could build reusable widgets without script, and some UAs could evolve their script settings to allow HTML modules but not JavaScript modules for a more locked down experience.
From there I'd hope we could find a way to use worklets to allow components to use script, but limit them to only the component's shadow DOM, not the global DOM, and not have default access to APIs like XHR and fetch, or other APIs used for fingerprinting.
[1]: https://github.com/w3c/webcomponents/blob/gh-pages/proposals...
[2]: https://github.com/MicrosoftEdge/MSEdgeExplainers/blob/maste...
Title Bar Customization for Web Apps
1 points · Open discussionWeb platform primitives for foldable devices
26 points · Open discussionShowing the 15 most recent of 16 sources. Enable JavaScript to search and browse every indexed mention.