On Mon, 21 May 2012, Mounir Lamouri wrote:
On 05/21/2012 04:34 PM, Boris Zbarsky wrote:
On 5/21/12 10:09 AM, Mounir Lamouri wrote:
On 05/20/2012 03:04 PM, Boris Zbarsky wrote:
On 5/20/12 5:45 AM, Paul Irish wrote:
Since no one mentioned it, I just wanted to make sure this thread is
aware
of the Network Information API [1], which provides
navigator.connection.bandwidth
It's been recently implemented (to some degree) in both Mozilla [2] and
Webkit [3].
As far as I can tell, the Mozilla implementation always returns Infinity
for .bandwidth.
This is not true. There is an implementation for Firefox Android which
is based on the connection type.
Ah, indeed. I had missed that codepath.
If I'm reading the right code now, that looks like it returns a constant
value for each connection type (e.g. if you're connected via Ethernet or
Wifi it returns 20; if you're connected via EDGE it returns 0.2, etc).
The idea is that the specification allows the implementation to be
trivial and improve without changing the specification.
That seems incredibly unlikely to work in practice. Early implementations
will return 20 or 0.2 and sites will do
if (bandwidth == 20) {
//get high quality site
} else {
//get simplified site
}
and users will be very surprised when upgrading their browser causes them
to get the simplified site or low quality assets when before they never
did.
And that
implementation is good enough for web pages to know if the user is in a
slow or fast connection without giving the connection type and leaking
information.
I think the fundamental problem with this API isn't that it might leak
information, it's that it's that it is quite likely to make the overall
user experience worse rather than better. It is also extremely difficult
to implement in a really good way as evidenced by the fact that all the
"implementations" so far are extremely half-hearted.
