On Fri, Jan 16, 2015 at 12:58 AM, Anne van Kesteren <ann...@annevk.nl> wrote: > * "Permissions API" this has been tried several times before. Given > that there's hardly any involvement from UX in standards, it's not > clear that this is a good idea. See also > http://robert.ocallahan.org/2011/06/permissions-for-web-applications_30.html
Note that the scope of this spec is very narrow (which sadly isn't reflected in the name). The scope *only* covers querying if a given API will be automatically denied, automatically granted or if UI will be displayed. So it's not attempting to solve permissions in general. Nor does it allow even asking for permission to use a particular API. This might not seem like terribly important functionality, but it's something that web developers ask for a lot. With this API they can do things like hide "turn on camera" buttons if the user has permanently forbidden a website from using camera. Or they can inform the user that a security dialog is about to be displayed. Right now well-meaning websites see a lot of dropoff whenever they cause a security dialog to be displayed because many people don't understand the dialog and (wisely) choose "no". Obviously a lot of users also choose "yes" even when they don't understand a security dialog, but far from all do. By enabling websites to check if a dialog will be displayed, the "good guys" will have the ability to educate the user. I don't think there are any security risks with enabling websites to do this education. The bad guys can simply always put up text which tries to trick the user that a dialog is harmless. There could be some privacy concerns with this API. If we add the ability to set blanket policies like "forbid camera for all websites except for X.com and Y.com", then websites could use the fact that they see a "access will be automatically denied" as extra fingerprinting bits. However there are ways to implement such policies without leaking additional information. We can simply make the permissions API lie and return whatever the default behavior is until the website actually tries to use the given API. At that point we could automatically deny and then make the permissions API reflect the real behavior. / Jonas _______________________________________________ dev-platform mailing list dev-platform@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform
