Posted by auberonedu 15 hours ago
I found this issue: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1980392 and commit: https://phabricator.services.mozilla.com/D262053
It looks like per-domain WebGPU blocking was added exclusively just for easyeda.com !
Haven't read it all, but the story seems to be that EasyEDA's WebGPU usage was broken because it relies on some aspects which Firefox hasn't implemented yet. So they made this blocklist to get Firefox to behave as if it lacked WebGPU support completely on this domain, which makes EasyEDA fallback to some other non-broken version. Maybe they couldn't get in touch with EasyEDA directly, since it seems far easier to have them just disable WebGPU for some known versions of Firefox.
which seems like an insane thing to need or support. literally just pick a different name, there are infinitely many!
i can understand just deciding to ignore the site
I think near any anti-fingerprinting efforts though presume some floor level of system security and stability. If some particular hardware exposure feature lets attackers run arbitrary low level timing and hardware testing code or crash the system or break the sandbox the game is likely over for most people.
An extra bit of entropy isn't meaningless sure, but at some point there should be some weighing of absolute attack surface against it right? Some features just seem inherently anti-privacy/anti-security and one might just have to try to deal with that via other approaches.
Maybe it did and you're just hooked up to the Matrix thinking it didn't
The only arguments I've ever heard in favor of wasm/webgpu were that using native graphics/GUI toolkit APIs are a pain. That's definitely true, because I've written stuff with gtk and it sucks, but that doesn't mean we should just shovel an entire tech stack into the browser.
Just because we can, doesn't mean we should. I'm tired of these BigCos shitting everything up.
For WASM though, I do not agree at all! It's genuinely a great system for high performance browser code. So much stuff I use now had WASM as the backbone, and I even started applying it outside of the browser in some of my architecture. I wish we had way more enthusiasm behind things like WASM, and way less for something like WebUSB.
Like, Tesco would prefer that my operating system was a roast chicken, Baowu Group would prefer it was made of steel, Berghain would prefer that it had to queue for hours to possibly get in, and Jagex would prefer it was an in-game GUI within RuneScape. None of those companies got their way, what makes Netscape special?
Locked up my entire M1 Macbook Pro, held power button and I was back into chrome in <20s but I did kinda go "why did I just do that?"
I tried several webview-based browsers, Chrome, and Brave, with them the phone completely freezes (except that the audio keeps going for a bit).
I tested webview browsers because by chance the first place I ran it on was Telegram's internal browser (on which the phone does freeze).
It doesn't do anything on Firefox though, and weirdly enough not even on the Chromium-based Cromite (after enabling WebGL).
I only tried waiting for a few minutes, but it wasn't giving signs of life.
If someone wants to try, keep in mind that to force restart a Pixel you have to press the power button for 30 seconds (during which you might break out in a cold sweat).
In Chrome on Linux:
WebGPU is experimental on this platform. See https://github.com/gpuweb/gpuweb/wiki/Implementation-Status#... deathray/:9
Failed to create WebGPU Context Provider main @ deathray/:9 (anonymous) @ deathray/:113
Uncaught (in promise) TypeError: Failed to execute 'configure' on 'GPUCanvasContext': Failed to read the 'device' property from 'GPUCanvasConfiguration': Required member is undefined. at main (deathray/:17:17)
Worse and less defensible on the web of course.
Why does this spill over? Unlike CPU which is multiplexed by the kernel's scheduler (so infinite loops can't lock out other programs), is the GPU not multiplexed in the same fashion?
Often there's shared resources that are statically allocated to shaders (register space, local memory etc.) that means you often can't "just" add a new task if those shared resources are already in use. But not using those resources to their full would cause performance issues.
And the internal state of a GPU is often very large, much larger than a CPU, so suspending the current tasks, saving out their state and replace it with a "higher priotity" one can be very expensive - so often an afterthought of support at best.