alt Hacker NewsHow would you prevent that? If you want to use a feature, you need to know if that feature is available. So you add methods/functions to ensure that you can fail gracefully when something is not available. That availability is the fingerprint. I don't blame the browsers as much as asshats using the tool for malicious purposes. We're not going to ban hammers because someone uses them for things other than driving nails.
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need to license swe just like real engineers and make them have a responsibility to the public
In the old days, we just sent the content and let the client figure out what to do with it. If you navigated to homestarrunner.com and you didn't have flash installed, you just got a message saying to install it, or worst case, a broken icon in a frame.
We figured it out just fine.
Another one is "draw text, read back pixels" which is simultaneously a really effective fingerprint, and also cuts to the core of what we want a web browser to do. We can't refuse to draw text.