Microsoft Proposes a Dual-Screen Future for Web Apps

It’s no secret Microsoft is going all-in on dual-screen devices. So far, the company has talked a lot about developing dual-screen experiences for Android, and it’s today talking about dual-screen experiences on Windows 10X.

But what about the web? This week, Microsoft is officially sharing its plans for bringing the benefits of dual-screen devices to the web.

Windows Intelligence In Your Inbox

Sign up for our new free newsletter to get three time-saving tips each Friday — and get free copies of Paul Thurrott's Windows 11 and Windows 10 Field Guides (normally $9.99) as a special welcome gift!

"*" indicates required fields

This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.

[ad unit=’in_content_premium_block’]

The company is revealing how it plans to allow developers to build web apps that take full advantage of dual-screen devices. Microsoft is proposing a new JavaScript API and a CSS media query that will enable web developers to take better advantage of all the upcoming dual-screen devices.

Microsoft’s proposed system will make it easier for developers to adapt their websites to wider-screens UI patterns, and adapt to these new types of dual-screen devices without making significant changes to their existing website design. “The web platform does not yet provide the necessary primitives for building layouts that are optimized for foldable experiences. Developers may be able to solve this by taking a hard dependency on a specific device hardware parameters – an approach that is fragile, not scalable, and requires work duplication for each new device,” the proposal reads.

The company plans to contribute its implementation for these new APIs to Chromium. Microsoft is also adding the ability to remotely debug dual-screen devices from Microsoft Edge on their desktop.

Microsoft has detailed its proposal on GitHub here, where you can find out more about the technical details for these new APIs.

Tagged with

Share post

Please check our Community Guidelines before commenting

Conversation 2 comments

  • iantrem

    Premium Member
    12 February, 2020 - 4:17 am

    <p>Another reason why Edge has taken on the Chrome engine. Microsoft proposes CSS and JavaScript changes which will then need to be baked into the Chrome engine which means Google needs to be on board. If Edge had it's own engine still, Google could just ignore it and go it's own way.</p>

  • nbplopes

    12 February, 2020 - 2:10 pm

    <p>Devs will only touch this if it helps them sell more. With no customer base in dual screen products … it will never happen. If it had 100 million it would not happens. Much more had UWP and …</p><p><br></p><p>So there MS should be proposing much more rather than throwing peanuts to monkeys. That era has passed.</p><p><br></p><p>In contrast, Azure team is doing … a great job.</p>

Windows Intelligence In Your Inbox

Sign up for our new free newsletter to get three time-saving tips each Friday

"*" indicates required fields

This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.

Thurrott © 2024 Thurrott LLC