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Apple declined to implement 16 Web APIs in Safari due to privacy concerns

(www.zdnet.com)
428 points coronadisaster | 2 comments | 29 Jun 20 10:16 UTC | HN request time: 1.467s | source
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manishsharan ◴[29 Jun 20 11:47 UTC] No.23676660[source]▶
Good. Those APIs were awful. If your website needs to know the battery status or other such information , you need to be writing an app which I will never download.
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pcmaffey ◴[29 Jun 20 13:36 UTC] No.23677424[source]▶
What if battery status was used to triage tasks? Wait to do something intensive if you’re low, etc. Seems like a respectful enhancement.

If theses APIs are only accessible with user consent, I don’t see the problem.

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1. cstuder ◴[29 Jun 20 14:02 UTC] No.23677685[source]▶
It's not easy. Mozilla ran into the privacy implications of the battery status API a couple of years ago: It was so precise that it allows the mentioned fingerprinting: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2016/11/firefox_remov...

Every additional API added to the browser makes the risk of such side effects greater.

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2. lopis ◴[29 Jun 20 14:12 UTC] No.23677772[source]▶
> It was so precise

Then make it less so. Browser APIs can - and do - lie to their users. For example, if you try to query the color of a visited link, you won't get the actual color, but instead you get the default link color. This is to prevent an old bug that let you basically harvest a user's browsing history.