On Wed, Jul 2, 2014 at 2:19 AM, Ryosuke Niwa <rn...@apple.com> wrote:
> On May 3, 2014, at 10:49 AM, Adam Barth <w...@adambarth.com> wrote: > > > Over on blink-dev, we've been discussing [1] adding a property to > navigator > > that reports the number of cores [2]. As far as I can tell, this > > functionality exists in every other platform (including iOS and Android). > > Some of the use cases for this feature have been discussed previously on > > this mailing list [3] and rejected in favor of a more complex system, > > perhaps similar to Grand Central Dispatch [4]. Others have raised > concerns > > that exposing the number of cores could lead to increased fidelity of > > fingerprinting [5]. > > > > My view is that the fingerprinting risks are minimal. This information > is > > already available to web sites that wish to spend a few seconds probing > > your machine [6]. Obviously, exposing this property makes that easier > and > > more accurate, which is why it's useful for developers. > > > > IMHO, a more complex worker pool system would be valuable, but most > systems > > that have such a worker pool system also report the number of hardware > > threads available. Examples: > > > > C++: > > std::thread::hardware_concurrency(); > > > > Win32: > > GetSystemInfo returns dwNumberOfProcessors > > > > POSIX: > > sysctl returns HW_AVAILCPU or HW_NCPU > > > > Java: > > Runtime.getRuntime().availableProcessors(); > > > > Python: > > multiprocessing.cpu_count() > > > > In fact, the web was the only platform I could find that didn't make the > > number of cores available to developers. > > FWIW, this property has been added to WebKit [1] and Blink [2] although > that's not an indication of any browser actually shipping it for WebKit. > Since there are now 2 implementations, it should be added to the spec instead of just being a wiki.
