[webkit-dev] Removing the prefix from webkitPostMessage

[Ojan Vafai]

On Thu, Sep 13, 2012 at 12:06 PM, Dirk Pranke <dpranke at chromium.org> wrote:

> 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.
>

FWIW, Tab has adding roughly this for prefixed CSS properties. Not sure
what the status of that is, but the code has been committed AFAIK.
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