Hi folks,
I thought I’d post something I found out the other day. I uprevved my Mac Chrome browser from 81.xxx to 83.xxx and a lot of my HTML widgets in a p5.js sketch broke. Well, substantially changed their appearance, and font sizes. And in the case of the Color Picker, just plain broke - the five options (RGB sliders, colour wheel, fixed palette etc) were replaced by just one “colour field” picker, with no eye-dropper colour sampler, and I think not even a hex colour option (I forget if that last one is exactly true).
So after much searching, I found this is deliberate ! Chrome and Edge have got together and “harmonised” their widgets, and “improved” them. I can tell you from my own experience that if Microsoft offers to help you “improve” something, be very, very, very afraid.
Details:
Lots of people complaining about it. It’s quite a major change to force on web pages. And Firefox and Safari have not changed, although they weren’t 100% identical before either.
Anyway, there is a solution. You can force Chrome back to the old style …
Put this in your Chrome address bar …
chrome://flags/#form-controls-refresh
It brings up a bunch of internal options … set the Web Platform Controls updated UI ie. the one you land on, to Disabled. Have to then restart browser. Then you’re back to Chrome 81 behaviour.
I don’t know how long that escape route will last. I wonder whether p5.js can bring any pressure to bear to keep it available.
Ciao, GE.
PS. I’ll cross-post to p5.js GitHub.