Chrome 89 Beta Enables WebHID By Default, Other New Web APIs

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Chrome 89 Beta Enables WebHID By Default, Other New Web APIs

Following last week's release of Google Chrome 88, the Chrome 89 beta is now available for testing...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Chrome-89-Beta

[ezst036]

Google is still conducting espionage on people though.

[Paradigm Shifter]

So should I be worried about Chrome suddenly deciding to turn NFC on, on my phone, because a website has found a way to tell it to?

I'm only partly joking...

[Danny3]

Each new release seems to add better tools for fingerprinting and tracking users.
Who the fuck needs cookies and accounts anymore when you have access to unique hardware IDs and connected devices?
Google is unbelievable these days or I should say these years as is going on for some years.

[blae]

You kinda try to stir up something when you say that theres no Linux support for web sharing - I thought that was about screen sharing or something, but they talk about that share mechanism where you send things between apps like in Android when you e.g. share a picture with the Messages app.

I dont think we _want_ that functionality in Linux, theres no infrastructure to make use of it, and it would get annoying fast if they were to try to implement something like that..

[sindr]

And so the browsers' steadily metastasized, well on their way to overtaking their hosts.

[polarathene]

Each new release seems to add better tools for fingerprinting and tracking users.
Who the fuck needs cookies and accounts anymore when you have access to unique hardware IDs and connected devices?
Google is unbelievable these days or I should say these years as is going on for some years.

Flatpak would help sandbox that though no? So only if you want such features to be useful to you and explicitly grant access (even if just temporarily), that should be something Flatpak could enable?

[hsci]

• WebHID
• Web NFC
• Web Serial API

Reasons to worry. That is stuff which shall not be implemented in a web browser. So somebody didn't learned anything from Flash, Applets and Plugins (!= Extensions)? Isn't Electron worse enough? Hopefully this stuff get soon misused, so people can learn before it becomes really worse.

I'm a web browser, let me access hardware via JavaScript...what could go wrong?

[Danny3]

Flatpak would help sandbox that though no? So only if you want such features to be useful to you and explicitly grant access (even if just temporarily), that should be something Flatpak could enable?

Maybe, everyone is saying that, but I have not ever seen anything to ask me to grant permissions or not.
I guess the only safe way it to use a fork like Ungoogled-Chromium that should strip these features completely.

[phoronix_anon]

I'd prefer less information about closed-source and FOSS-hostile Google products from FOSS blogs. If it's related to an open-source project, I'd be all for it, otherwise it is just free advertising.