- From: Max Romantschuk <max@romantschuk.fi>
- Date: Mon, 31 Aug 2009 12:49:21 +0300
> On Aug 29, 2009, at 00:47, David Bennett wrote: >> There currently is no way to detect the system idle state in the >> browser. Henri Sivonen wrote: > How could such a notification be abused? The first abuse use case I can > think of is throttling Web Workers-based botnet computation to be less > detectable by the user (i.e. taking over the user's compute resources > while the user isn't experiencing the slowdown). True, but this could probably be implemented to a largely equivalent degree using the techniques currently employed by sites in lieu of a dedicated API to know when the user is idle. I agree that an event model would be a good idea. Having a straightforward way to disable wasteful bandwidth usage when the user becomes idle is a good thing. Still, being able to check the idle state without events could be useful for some code, say a periodical executer that checks the idle state prior to doing it's work. If events are the only interface a developer would have to implement their own state keeping. One issue: Is the user idle when the tab is in the background, when the browser is in the background, or when the user is away from the machine? These are all distinct cases of different levels of "idleness", and it's largely depended on the use case which kind of "idleness" makes sense for a particular application. .max -- Max Romantschuk max at romantschuk.fi http://max.romantschuk.fi/
Received on Monday, 31 August 2009 02:49:21 UTC