[webkit-dev] support for navigator.cores or navigator.hardwareConcurrency

[Dean Jackson]

On 6 May 2014, at 11:13 am, Rik Cabanier <cabanier at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Mon, May 5, 2014 at 5:52 PM, Simon Fraser <simon.fraser at apple.com> wrote:
> It allows attackers to know even more about my system, exposing more data for fingerprinting.
> 
> People can already approximate this today. Approximations are fuzzy so this might hurt performance if you're not a popular platform or change how the browser implements workers.

There is a difference between approximation and clear detection. During discussion of a related feature on the WebGL list (for exposing the GPU information to the page), I noted at the time that it would allow any page in the world to detect you'd spent X thousand dollars on a Mac Pro in the last 30 days. Being able to detect the number of cores provides more info - e.g. you spent X + Y thousand dollars for the upgrade.

"Let's not show that user ads for vacations in Compton... let's show them the Bahamas instead."

>  
> Do you really want a page to know that you have a  fancy-pants 24-core Mac Pro rather than a little Mac mini?
> 
> Yes!
> If I have 24 cores ready to do work and the page can put them to use, I would like it to do so.
> At the same time, if I just have a old mac mini, I don't want the page to launch 24 workers as that will exhaust my memory and cause contention. 

But as Oliver said, maybe I don't want the page to use all cores.

Dean



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