Bug 69389 – Mask underlying RENDERER and VENDOR strings

• Component: WebGL
• Status: RESOLVED FIXED

[Kenneth Russell]

After extensive discussion in the WebGL working group, it appears that the consensus among browser vendors is that exposing the underlying GPU's GL_RENDERER and GL_VENDOR strings via WebGL is problematic. The reasons presented are twofold. First, they expose a certain number of bits of personally identifiable information. Second, they have similar properties to the browser's user-agent string, which has been an extremely problematic construct in the development of the web.

The plan is to stop reporting the underlying GPU's strings and instead report something generic, and to do so for all of WebKit's ports, to maintain parity.

It's possible this decision might be revisited in the future, but for the time being, this change seems necessary in order to match the behavior of Firefox and Opera.

[Kenneth Russell]

Created attachment 109725 [details]
Patch

[Sam Weinig]

Comment on attachment 109725 [details]
Patch

What is the point of exposing VENDOR or RENDERER at all?

[Kenneth Russell]

(In reply to comment #2)
> (From update of attachment 109725 [details])
> What is the point of exposing VENDOR or RENDERER at all?

They're part of the OpenGL ES 2.0 specification, and an early design principle for WebGL was not to arbitrarily subset the API.

Some sophisticated applications also have wanted to change their behavior slightly based on the values of these strings to achieve the best performance on various graphics cards. The authors of these applications aren't happy that the real information will be masked, but we're still working toward a solution that works for everybody.

[WebKit Review Bot]

Comment on attachment 109725 [details]
Patch

Clearing flags on attachment: 109725

Committed r96726: <http://trac.webkit.org/changeset/96726>

[WebKit Review Bot]

All reviewed patches have been landed.  Closing bug.