I'm fearing this could be the new <marquee> or <blink>, or because iPods (and iPads?) don't have vibrate it won't be used.
I can see this being used for games, but that's about it. Until we have web pages running as background tasks, it's not going to be used for a lot.
>Until we have web pages running as background tasks
That would make the Grooveshark HTML5 app 99% more useful than it currently is (not at all).
While a nice feature for games, in particular, can this be disabled in Firefox? It seems it would affect battery life.
The browser should offer some kind of permission system (like with the GPS sensor) that would ask the user if a website has permissions to access the vibrate API.
That's kind of ridiculous "example.com wants permission to make your phone vibrate".
It's just like using location information. There are cases where it might be appropriate, such as web-based chat, or webmail. But there are many more cases where it would not be appropriate.
What's kind of ridiculous is every advertisement under the sun begins vibrating the device.
You can toggle Firefox's "dom.vibrator.enabled" about:config pref.
Misleading title is misleading.
It's called "Vibration API" and it's an article about a Vibration API.