The linked article is from August 2016. The news is that due to this research Mozilla has now removed the battery API from Firefox: https://www.fxsitecompat.com/en-CA/docs/2016/battery-status-api-has-been-removed/
The linked article is from August 2016. The news is that due to this research Mozilla has now removed the battery API from Firefox: https://www.fxsitecompat.com/en-CA/docs/2016/battery-status-api-has-been-removed/
How on Earth did a feature this stupid even make it into the browser in the first place?
<strike>Probably a carry over from FirefoxOS. I’m pretty sure this feature was not supported in other browsers.</strike>
Never mind, just reread the article more carefully, apparently it is a W3C candidate recommendation. “Javascript all the things”, I guess? There’s still a possibility the impetus was FirefoxOS, though that’s just a wild guess.
Yeah, that makes sense. Oh, Mozilla.
ETA: ugh. Just … ugh.
Chrome OS also seems like a candidate.
Knowing that you’re on battery would be useful to tone down animations or whatever other task.
That’s a job for my scheduler, not your jive-ass runtime.
Seriously. The user knows when their battery is low (it may be the one system monitor most users are actually in tune with). They can decide whether browsing the web with 2% battery is a good idea or not.
Maybe browsers could also have a “battery saving mode” that is turned off and on. Then people could mark that they want a less resource hungry web experience without exposing the battery.
That would unquestionably be better; but native applications that aren’t servants of the ad economy would be better yet.
Jetbrains IDEs have this. Presumably it tones down indexing and background tasks… I’ve never felt the need to use it TBH
As a workaround in Firefox < 52, go to about:config and set dom.battery.enabled to false.
I’m not sure if this can be worked around in Chrome. Does anyone know?
Is there some collection of Firefox configuration options that can/should be set to protect privacy and security?
There are a couple people who actually maintain a few lists like this one: https://github.com/amq/firefox-debloat
but there is no consolidated thread out there (to my knowledge)