[mcsmash]

This. The internet desperately needs to progress beyond an advertisement driven business model. Disallowing these scripts seems a little heavy handed. Perhaps the addition of a "requestComputeResources" method to the browser's api would give a way to throttle them instead of outright banning them.

[endorphone]

They make it optional.

To be real, though, somewhere close to 0% (rounded to the third decimal place) of users would agree to grossly inefficient cryptomining in the browser. As a web funding model it is terrible and is almost always akin to malware. It certainly costs the user much more in electricity costs than it will ever benefit web publishers.

[bodyloss]

And as a global ecological cost, it's pretty huge.

[SilasX]

>They make it optional.

Mozilla? Optional protection? Don't trigger my memories.

They also made it optional to block unsigned extensions, which you could turn off if you wanted to tweak one to fix a bug because it wasn't being maintained fast enough.

Like, if you believed in the whole Open Source/tinkering philosophy, or something, which Mozilla may or may not care about.

Then, they started disallowing it in 2016.

And they turned off key remapping too.

[simias]

I wholeheartedly agree that we need to progress beyond the ad-driven business model but is in-browser mining really a plausible replacement?

For one thing it's probably not a good idea on battery-powered devices, so it's only useful for monetizing desktop browsing. It also means that the money you make out of it depends on the average power your "customer" has available to mine.

Beyond that since mining is a zero-sum game it means that the more people opt for this model, the less money they individually make. Maybe today you make on average 0.001cent per minute and per user and a year from now you make a tenth of that. You have absolutely zero control on it since it's merely a factor of the total hashrate and the cryptocurrency's value.

I have a hard time imagining how this could become mainstream. Tipping using cryptocurrency microtransaction seems more promising but even that is far from a solved problem. I'd rather directly send $.002 to the website rather than waste $.01 of electricity for the website to make $.001 out of it.

[Avamander]

The thing is that with ad networks you're at their mercy, if they don't want to sell ads on your site, you have no other option. While it would be nice to have a micropayment system built into browsers themselves, cryptomining is kind-of the best option.

[VWWHFSfQ]

Nobody would use that API if they can just do it anyway without the users consent

[kevingadd]

There's not really a way to detect that someone is cryptomining, they can just do it with regular JS or webgl (which has a compute focused API in the works). I don't think either of those features could ever be opt-in. Detecting mining in WebAssembly would be even harder.