RE: Reminder: RfC: Last Call Working Draft of Web Workers; deadline April 21

On Wed, 20 Apr 2011, Travis Leithead wrote:
> 
> We are concerned about the privacy implications we discovered when 
> reviewing the current web workers editor's draft in its treatment of 
> shared workers [1]. Specifically, the spec as currently written allows 
> for 3rd party content to use shared workers to connect and share 
> (broker) information between top-level domains as well as make resource 
> requests on behalf of all connections. For example, a user may visit a 
> site "A.com" which hosts a 3rd party iframe of domain "3rdParty.com" 
> which initially creates a shared worker. Then, the user (from a 
> different page/window) opens a web site "B.com" which also hosts a 3rd 
> party iframe of domain "3rdParty.com", which (per the spec text below, 
> and as confirmed several browser's implementations) should be able to 
> connect to the same shared worker. The end user only sees domains 
> "A.com" and "B.com" in his or her browser window

What sites the user sees in his or her browser window depends entirely on 
the browser vendor's decisions here, it's a UI issue. There's no reason 
3rdparty.com couldn't appear as well. Similarly, whether the same shared 
worker can actually be obtained by two unrelated iframes is also a 
decision the user agent has to make.

FWIW, on the long term, I intend to add a feature wherein a page can open 
a shared worker cross-origin (assuming the other origin agrees) directly, 
without having to use iframes. There's a whole host of features that such 
a mechanism would enable which currently have to be done using the 
awkward iframe mechanism you describe.

-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'

Received on Thursday, 21 April 2011 04:08:33 UTC