Thursday, December 20, 2007

Google Discontinues Inline Gadgets

Google earlier this month announced they’ll stop allowing new gadgets for iGoogle which are using the “html-inline” functionality. An inline gadget, as opposed to a normal gadget, can have more control over the full iGoogle page as it is not wrapped in an inline frame. Typical uses of an inline gadget may be changing the Google logo, creating a themes directory gadget, or uncluttering the iGoogle homepage by removing certain links... in other words, all the kind of stuff you need to do when you want to “break out” of your iframe. As you can imagine, this may pose security risks, in particular when it comes to Google account kidnapping (even though Google did have some preventions against that).

Google on December 8th said:

[I]nlined gadgets will officially become deprecated and blocked from being rendered on iGoogle. As promised, we will take a snapshot of all inlined gadgets that currently exist and specifically allow only those that were collected to continue rendering.

If the schedule went as announced, the snapshot has been taken on December 12th. Google employee Dann emphasized that existing inlined gadgets will continue to be supported as normal. Additionally, Google says they won’t rule out completely that they may accept proposals for individual new inline gadgets in the future, but that they have no immediate plans to do so.

[Thanks Ionut!]

Google Discontinues Inlin ... by Philipp Lenssen | Comments (3+3)

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