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by kevingadd 1164 days ago
Saturating the user with permissions requests for every single website they visit is a dead-end idea. We have decades of browser development and UI design history to show that if you saturate the user with nag prompts that don't mean anything to them, they will just mechanically click yes or no (whichever option makes the website work).
2 comments

Permission popups can be replaced with an additional permission toolbar or with a button in the address bar user needs to click. This way they won't be annoying and won't require a click to dismiss.
Like the site settings page on Chrome, which is in the address bar (clicking the lock icon)? You can set the permissions (including defaults) for like 50 of these APIs.
You can display only permissions that a page requests, starting from most important ones.

For example, toolbar could look like:

Enable: [ location ] [ camera ] [ fingerprinting via canvas ] ...

We already have extensions for websites that spam the user with unwanted popups and other displays. Those just need to be extended to cover permission abuse and be included by default in all webbrowsers.