[webkit-dev] Removing the prefix from webkitPostMessage

[Dirk Pranke]

On Wed, Sep 12, 2012 at 11:00 PM, Maciej Stachowiak <mjs at apple.com> wrote:
>
> On Sep 12, 2012, at 10:36 PM, Ojan Vafai <ojan at chromium.org> wrote:
>
> On Wed, Sep 12, 2012 at 6:40 PM, Maciej Stachowiak <mjs at apple.com> wrote:
>>
>> - Is this approach substantially less time and effort than adding a
>> histogram-style metric? I expect you have added a histogram to Chrome at
>> some point, and so can comment  on the relative difficulty and time to
>> produce an answer.
>>   (BTW we have the capability to do this type of thing in Safari as well,
>> and it is what I ask Apple engineers to do when they want to remove a
>> feature, even a purely Mac-specific one.)
>
>
> FWIW, histograms can only tell you a percentile. We never report back URLs
> due to privacy concerns. So, it's somewhat underpowered compared to
> experimentally removing a feature and seeing what sites break. I'm not
> saying that's not a useful signal, just clarifying what data is possible for
> Chromium to gather in the wild.
>
>
> That's about what the equivalent Safari mechanism does too. What it can tell
> you is stuff like "feature x is used very little by sites users actually
> visit" without risk of breakage. But if there is significant use, it won't
> tell you what sites it is on or whether it's critical.
>

Technically we can build histograms that either give you a percentage
of sites or a percentage of page views without compromising privacy
overly. The combination of the two is a pretty good approximation of
importance.

It would be interesting to build a generic mechanism for monitoring
prefixed APIs ... I wonder how hard that would be.

-- Dirk