| > Nobody has a VR headset. Atleast 2 million Oculus Quests have been sold. And if no one has these devices, then WebXR is mostly useless for fingerprinting anyway. > I actually do have a very expensive VR headset, and it's sat in the box for a few years since I initially played with it. Goody for you. I have a Switch, Playstation, and Xbox that mostly sit rusting on the shelf as I mostly play PC games with mouse/keyboard. So therefore, my anecdote transfers to everyone? > The problem here is Googlers have a completely unrealistic worldview No, the problem here is, you have a derangement syndrome around Google. You rarely mention Facebook for example. Every company is working on AR/VR. Facebook, Microsoft, and Mozilla contributed major parts of the spec, but I'd say Facebook cares way more about VR these days than Google and they are betting the future of their company on it. > It's just not something that belongs in a standard web browser toolset, and it's yet another thing I have to shut off to keep people safe on the web. Maybe you have a point with MIDI, but musicians would probably disagree, but USB devices are ubiquitous, and VR/AR will be in the tens of millions of users within a few years, 6.1 million units predicted to be shipped this year, that's an exponential gain. And we all know that once Apple ships AR glasses, it'll explode further. The real irony of your post is, if Facebook succeeds, Oculus will own a majority of the market, and they will control VR browsing in a Chrome fork (Oculus Browser), so they will put whatever APIs they wish into it, and Google nor Mozilla's opinion won't matter. And if VR/AR becomes way more popular, which it seems poised to do, the fact that Chrome is 'safe' won't matter very much, and Google and Firefox will both end up implementing whatever Facebook wants to make it into their app store. > Go to a senior living complex, sit down with someone who is not in the tech industry, and see if you can help them figure out how to clean all the notifications permissions and sleezy browser extensions out of their Chrome install. How about you check their iPhones for how many recurring subscriptions they've been tricked into buying "1 month free", and forgot to cancel. I regularly find these on ordinary people's phones. They install apps, start a 1-month trial, and end up paying $5-10/mo zombie subscriptions for a long time before they notice. But hey, notification permissions are the real problem, not their bank account being drained. |
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
> You rarely mention Facebook for example.
Facebook is incredibly easy to not use and block. Google is a monopoly in almost every space it operates in, and I've been trying to escape the great beast for five years, and I still encounter a new problem daily that can be summed up with "someone at Google thought this was a good idea, and now we have to deal with it".
Facebook is trying crazy things because it is having an existential crisis with the reality that the most profitable target demographic does not care about Facebook anymore, and probably won't any time soon.
> Maybe you have a point with MIDI, but musicians would probably disagree
I think musicians can install some sort of feature pack that adds these sorts of APIs, as everyone else doesn't need them, and a massive bloated attack surface is a bad thing to do to web browsers just for the sake of a single group. (I similarly think if you buy a VR headset, you could probably install some addition to your browser along with the inevitable hardware driver nonsense and setup.)
> if Facebook succeeds > if VR/AR becomes way more popular, which it seems poised to do
I do not think Facebook will convince everyone to strap monitors to their heads. It isn't the sort of concern that outweighs the massive problems I see day to day in real world scenarios.
> check their iPhones for how many recurring subscriptions they've been tricked into buying
This is arguably a very good concern, but Apple is probably the least worst offender here, as they wrap all those subscriptions into a single UI where you can easily remove them without having to call someone on the phone. Checking someone's credit card statement for these is far, far worse, and incredibly hard to get rid of. (Six months, two Better Business Bureau complaints, and a credit card dispute later, I finally cancelled a subscription recently.)