Re: Page Visibility, Geolocation, and DeviceOrientation

This should definitely be configurable.

If you do this in a blanket way then the whole Web Platform has just 
been crippled in comparison to native apps.

Currently iOS doesn't necessarily run these things in other tabs or when 
the browser is backgrounded....which means it's impossible to run 
location or orientation tracking apps when the browser isn't 
foregrounded and the screen on 8(

Android at least lets you create these types of useful background apps 
and hopefully one day iOS will head more towards this as they free up 
their background process restrictions.

But if we bake this restriction into the spec then this whole domain of 
applications is guaranteed to be excluded from the Web Platform 8(


On a slightly related note, does anyone know any good reason why the 
geolocation API should consistently be considerably less accurate than 
native location services?

roBman


On 1/11/13 2:56 AM, Michael van Ouwerkerk wrote:
> Hi, there are some concerns around battery drain for both the 
> Geolocation and DeviceOrientation apis. The problem is that having a 
> browser tab running in the background and using power hungry hardware 
> like gps drains the battery of mobile devices too quickly.
>
> The Vibration api does something interesting around Page Visibility, 
> though not necessarily for power usage concerns. The idea is to 
> throttle or disable an api when the page is not visible.
>
> Could the concept of Page Visibility be worked into the Geolocation 
> and DeviceOrientation specs?
>
> Regards,
>
> Michael van Ouwerkerk

Received on Thursday, 31 October 2013 19:55:28 UTC