Is Google exerting too much pressure on web standards? In any case, the Californian giant’s proposals are not unanimous among browser publishers.
As we know, Google Chrome is certainly one of the least secure browsers on the market. To deal with the Mountain View firm, the competitors are betting very specifically on the protection of privacy. This is the case of Mozilla Firefox, Brave or the Swiss army knife browser Vivaldi.
A controversial API
These same players oppose the implementation of a new programming interface called Web Environment Integrity API within Chromium. Google explains that the latter makes it possible to ensure that the system used by the Internet user is “trustworthy”.
Chrome engineers specify that it is a question of better fighting bots to spam websites, to better secure financial transactions or even to be able to place copyrights. To do this, this interface sends back to the website visited a certain amount of information on the hardware configuration or the operating system used by the Internet user. It is then up to the website to authorize its access or not.
Beyond the collection of information constituting a form of fingerprinting, the opponents of this new set of APIs believe that this device could create a two-speed Internet with certain Internet users prohibited from accessing several sites. And then… who wants to see the implementation of DRM on the Web?
Mozilla calls for an open Web, that is to say with Internet sites accessible regardless of the browser used. To avoid this lag, this would therefore force Mozilla and Apple to integrate this API into the Gecko and Webkit engines to finally standardize a form of digital lock on the Web.
Source : Neowin
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