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Comment by codedokode | Hacker News Reader

Indeed, the WebGL extension that leaks videocard and driver name [1] is written by Google's employee.

[1] https://www.khronos.org/registry/webgl/extensions/WEBGL_debu...

I think you do need driver or video card name if you need to make it work (or have a usable performance) in every vendor.

Video cards behaves wildly different between vendors. Some shader runs smoothly in one vendor while lag like hell in another. And some don't even run correctly under certain vendor. Without knowing the vendor, it is not possible to patch them up to get a usable program.

They share the same API doesn't mean they behave identical.

Sure but most websites don't need this, and if they do they can ask nicely.

There is no way you can expect a non-technical user to understand the full implications of a prompt like that.

Then this feaure should be disabled so that nobody relies on it.

Something like: "This web site is requesting access to 3D acceleration. This is required for fancy 3D graphics, but can also give the web site more information about your computer than it would otherwise, which may be used to track you, so only say yes if you are expecting fancy 3D graphics and you trust this web site" seems usable?

1) Almost noone is going to read all that. It also assumes the common person knows what 3D acceleration is (yes gamer types and graphics professionals know what it is but the average grandparent probably won't).

2) WebGL is being used for a lot more than just 3D objects now -- it's used for everything from 2D games, graphing libraries and even webgl-accelerated machine learning in the browser (like tensorflow.js).

Most of the major applications that actually rely on WebGL do need this. Largely so they can avoid graphics glitches for the small fraction of users with buggy graphics drivers

…these are few and far between in comparison to the sheer amount of the web that now gets to freely query that information.

They should be asking nicely, not getting it for free.

Totally agree. I bet in the wild 99% of pages that use this are ad trackers and 1% are valid WebGL applications.

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