{"id":559,"date":"2020-12-22T20:18:30","date_gmt":"2020-12-22T20:18:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/stuff.tamius.net\/sacred-texts\/?p=559"},"modified":"2020-12-23T20:05:36","modified_gmt":"2020-12-23T20:05:36","slug":"ultrawidify-and-edge-2020-edition","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stuff.tamius.net\/sacred-texts\/2020\/12\/22\/ultrawidify-and-edge-2020-edition\/","title":{"rendered":"Ultrawidify and Edge (2020 edition)"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

It’s been a nice autumn evening when my phone buzzes. One new email, says the notification. It’s github. Ultrawidify doesn’t work on Edge at all.<\/em> Not on youtube, not on Netflix, nowhere. Curious,<\/em> I think to myself and wow to not take the Valve strategy this time around. Which, of course, happens anyway because it turns out that my weekends are considerably less free than I thought they would be (Not to mention that my brain sometimes works the way Beinoff, Weiss and DeBlois say it should \u2014 something something kinda<\/a> forgot<\/a>). Recent reviews on Chrome Web Store seem to echo that issue (I’m at least 99.7% sure at least one<\/em>, but likely more, of recent one-star reviews came from an Edge user, who has absolutely no business leaving reviews on CWS), though the majority is about issues that can be reproduced in Chrome.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So let’s see why Ultrawidify is broken on Edge, and why I pulled it from the Edge’s extension store, and why Edge users are getting this big ass red popup when they try to watch their Netflix.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Oh yea, spoiler alert: Ultrawidify is not<\/strong> broken on Edge. Edge is broken on Edge.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

ELI3: Webdev 101<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Long story extremely short: websites are just a bunch of rectangles. Sometimes said rectangles are inside each other, sometimes they’re next to each other, and it’s developer’s job to tell them where they should be and how big should they be.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Webdev: you don’t think it be like this, but (sometimes) it do<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

And this is what Ultrawidify does, ultimately: it tells one of the boxes to get bigger.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Player and the Video<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Ultrawidify only cares about two of these rectangles: the player and the video. The video is a special kind of rectangle: you can control its size, but it’s kind of a black box. You can’t control anything inside it, and it’s the browser’s job to handle displaying things inside the box. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In normal, functional browsers, things look like this:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Blue rectangle is the player, red rectangle is the video.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

And when we encounter a video with black bars, things look like this:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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This time, the video element also gets a blue tint.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

As you can see, two things happen: <\/p>\n\n\n\n