Comment by manishsharan
5 years ago
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.
5 years ago
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
It's a choice between walled garden browser or walled garden market. The anti-trust lawsuit will probably be interesting.
I dont think you are going to see Apple get in to any anti trust. What you will see is Google get broken up, with Apple, Tencent, Huawei, Microsoft etc swooping in and buying those pieces up.
You need a strong single Apple so that we can have our singular place to buy smartphones.
Bundling of the browser to the platform and making other browsers non-viable is probably covered under the previous Microsoft case law.
There is a use case for that kind of API for PWA's that a user would install, e.g. fullscreen games or applications that change their behaviour if battery is low (or network is slow). But those are far and few between.