Automatically redirect to your main client

[ineiti]

Having had another bad onboarding experience during a discussion about not using MS Teams (I sent the "Copy room link" from the element web client), I thought about how to make this experience better.

Going a bit through the archives (#15 #197 #16 #74 flaki@7eeadc4 #23 and others), I see that there are already quite some options, but neither of which makes it as easy as "click on the link"...

Proposition

Preparation of the web clients (e.g., element-web):

1. add a default_client_storage configuration option to element-web to point to a "matrix.to" server - by default it's off
   a) there can be a per-user configuration option which overrides the global setting either way (on -> off; off -> on; override the URL)
   b) for this to work, the inviter and the follower need to have the same default_client_storage
2. if the configuration is set, the element-web regularly opens a page from the default_client_storage server with an URL like:
   ${default_client_storage}#mymatrix.mydomain.mytld in the background. This is necessary, because the localStorage is private to a domain
3. This page from the default_cliet_storage stores the data after the # in the localStorage of the browser

Sharing a room

1. click the three dots on the room and choose "Copy room link - default client" (or make this the default if default_client_storage is set)
2. the link points to the default_client_storage server with an additional tag, e.g., ?use_default_server
3. if the page from default_client_storage detects a stored client in the localStorage of the browser, it shows a countdown (5 seconds) to redirect to the default client
   a) if multiple default clients are stored, it could redirect to the most used after 5 seconds, but display the other ones

Commets

• For mobile clients, matrix.to would need to recognize that it's running on mobile, and propose a rewritten matrix:// scheme

Problems

• need to open the link in the open tab, else the element web client complains that it's already open in another tab
• will not work with the desktop apps, as the matrix:// protocol is not implemented yet, from what I gather
• this breaks my first idea of getting the web-client to store data in a privacy-preserving way (using an iFrame to store data in the localStorage): https://developers.google.com/privacy-sandbox/cookies/storage-partitioning

Do you think this would be an acceptable extension to matrix.io and element-web?