Comment by runako
13 hours ago
> Yes, and I would say it's a bad thing that the OS tries to prevent this.
Another way to look at it is the OS makes certain guarantees to the developer around security. Giving control of this to the user would erode that guarantee from the OS to the developer. The result of that is that some developers would simply never display some information (e.g. due to their own contracts or reasonable concerns about fraud/abuse/etc.).
Very similar to the video pipelines in modern devices. Prior to video pipelines which the OS could attest could not be hijacked by the user, many content providers simply would not allow e.g. Netflix to release their content on certain platforms. That the OS does provide such an attestation option for developers allows uses that otherwise would not exist.
But… but they allowed. For a long time. Netflix didn’t need that.
Incorrect. There's a log written about this on the Internet. Suffice to say that Netflix did not allow all of their titles to be viewed on all browsers for years after it was technically feasible.