So the Battery Status API has just been removed, I think now is a good time to think about navigator.buildID again, which bug [1] has been inactive for a whole year.
4 years ago, Firefox 16 removed a minor version number from the user agent string to mitigate fingerprinting [2][3]. However, the build ID unique to each minor version is still exposed via the non-standard navigator.buildID property. Since trackers can easily retrieve build IDs from Mozilla Wiki [4] to map them to minor version numbers, the fix in Firefox 16 was totally meaningless. There were some legitimate use cases on Mozilla properties, for example, warning visitors who are using an outdated Firefox, but those usages have been replaced with the UITour API [5]. A comment in the bug [1] explains that Netflix was also using the build ID to detect a specific playback bug in Firefox, but it's probably not longer relevant. Given that, I believe the buildID property should be removed, or at least made chrome-only. Thoughts? [1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=583181 [2] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=728831 [3] https://www.fxsitecompat.com/en-CA/docs/2012/ua-string-no-longer-contains-patch-level-version-number/ [4] https://wiki.mozilla.org/Releases/Firefox_49/Test_Plan#Milestones [5] https://bedrock.readthedocs.io/en/latest/uitour.html -Kohei _______________________________________________ dev-platform mailing list dev-platform@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform
