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by throwntoday 1277 days ago
> I feel like they’re just using fingerprinting as an excuse to not implement functionality that people want.

Do you actually believe this? Do you not default to more practical explinations like, maybe they don't consider it worthwhile to support because of engineering cost vs people that actually use it?

For example, I'd say 9/10 people I know who aren't tech literate have no idea the Health app exists on their iPhone. This includes people with Apple watches. Similarly it should be obvious that basically nobody ever knew about or used that one feature you liked.

2 comments

I think engineering/support cost might be an excellent argument against implementing MIDI support in a browser, but the claim I responded to was that MIDI support wasn't on the table due to fingerprinting concerns (which are not obviously well-founded, from my outsider's perspective).

When I said "functionality that people want", I didn't mean to imply that there was a critical mass of people that made MIDI support in a browser obviously worthwhile, I just meant that some people want it and they're being told it won't happen because of fingerprinting.

When you make a web browser engine, you don't get to choose whether a use case is marginal or not (FWIW I use WebMIDI frequently in Chrome). You implement the standards or you perish.

Nobody wants a web browser that "chooses" not to work on some % of websites. Users choose, browsers implement. They are welcome to gate this feature behind a per-site permission prompt if they think it's insecure.