Re: Beacon API

On Feb 15, 2013, at 9:21 PM, Maciej Stachowiak <mjs@apple.com> wrote:

> 
> On Feb 15, 2013, at 3:51 AM, Ian Fette (イアンフェッティ) <ifette@google.com> wrote:
> 
>> Anne,
>> 
>> Both Chrome and Safari support the ping attribute. I am not sure about IE, I believe Firefox has it disabled by default. FWIW I wouldn't consider this a huge failure, if anything I'd expect over time people to use ping where it's supported and fallback where it's not, resulting in the same privacy tradeoff for users of all browsers but better performance for some browsers than others, which will eventually lead to a predictable outcome...
> 
> Are there any websites that use it, at least in the browsers that support it? Relative lack of web developer adoption so far makes it seem like a bad bet to make more features that do the same thing, unless we're confident that we know what was wrong with <a ping> in the first place.

BTW as far as I know the best current nonblocking technique to phone home on unload is to create an <img> in your unload handler pointing to the ping URL, this will result in reliable delivery without blocking at least in IE and WebKit-based browsers. I've found it hard to convince even knowledgable web developers to use this technique or <a ping> over synchronous XHR, even sites that are otherwise willing to do Safari-specific optimizations. I am not sure why sync XHR in unload is so tantalizing.

Regards,
Maciej

Received on Saturday, 16 February 2013 05:25:39 UTC