Re: [whatwg] Proposal: navigator.cores

On Wed, Jul 2, 2014 at 2:19 AM, Ryosuke Niwa <rniwa@apple.com> wrote:

> On May 3, 2014, at 10:49 AM, Adam Barth <w3c@adambarth.com> wrote:
>
> > Over on blink-dev, we've been discussing [1] adding a property to
> navigator
> > that reports the number of cores [2].  As far as I can tell, this
> > functionality exists in every other platform (including iOS and Android).
> > Some of the use cases for this feature have been discussed previously on
> > this mailing list [3] and rejected in favor of a more complex system,
> > perhaps similar to Grand Central Dispatch [4].  Others have raised
> concerns
> > that exposing the number of cores could lead to increased fidelity of
> > fingerprinting [5].
> >
> > My view is that the fingerprinting risks are minimal.  This information
> is
> > already available to web sites that wish to spend a few seconds probing
> > your machine [6].  Obviously, exposing this property makes that easier
> and
> > more accurate, which is why it's useful for developers.
> >
> > IMHO, a more complex worker pool system would be valuable, but most
> systems
> > that have such a worker pool system also report the number of hardware
> > threads available.  Examples:
> >
> > C++:
> > std::thread::hardware_concurrency();
> >
> > Win32:
> > GetSystemInfo returns dwNumberOfProcessors
> >
> > POSIX:
> > sysctl returns HW_AVAILCPU or HW_NCPU
> >
> > Java:
> > Runtime.getRuntime().availableProcessors();
> >
> > Python:
> > multiprocessing.cpu_count()
> >
> > In fact, the web was the only platform I could find that didn't make the
> > number of cores available to developers.
>
> FWIW, this property has been added to WebKit [1] and Blink [2] although
> that's not an indication of any browser actually shipping it for WebKit.
>

Since there are now 2 implementations, it should be added to the spec
instead of just being a wiki.

Received on Wednesday, 2 July 2014 06:59:29 UTC