alt Hacker NewsYay! Next up, <usermedia>, which is even more vital a permission to be able to flip on and off!! https://github.com/WICG/PEPC/blob/main/usermedia_element.md https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/g/blink-dev/c/jQgYo...
As noted in the intent to ship for both, these are a very specific narrow cases chipped off a bunch broader attempt to offer declarative ways to handle permissions in general, a <permission> element.
Intent-to-ship for geolocation: https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/g/blink-dev/c/GL0Bk...
Earlier Page-Embedded Permissions Control (PEPC) proposal: https://github.com/WICG/proposals/issues/113 https://github.com/andypaicu/PEPC/blob/main/explainer.md
The root problem is that permissions right now are super hard to adjust for users (and the way they are exposed to the page is not very good at dealing with users turning permissions on and off either). It's imo very good that we are finally leaving this awful tarpit of design, & moving towards permissions being more fluid. I get that other browsers wanted to be conservative & not do a generic <permission> element, but given how big an improvement this feels like, I sort of wish it'd gotten the pass.
> The root problem is that permissions right now are super hard to adjust for users
Unlike you I'm not getting paid enough by google to accept this narrative. The root problem for google is "high denial rates" of geolocation prompts, as clearly stated by Google in the post.
Now please tell me what information the geolocation prompt actually provides to the website that cannot be taken from the IP address, which is already tracked and processed by google and every single website tracking tool. IP address tells the website about the city where users come from.
The root problem with "high denial rates" is that Google wants to know if you live in the rich part of town or in the poor part of town. This is why google engineers try to find new ways for users to permanently undo their blocking of geolocation permission.
If google engineers had any concern about their users, then the default option would be a way to temporarily allow geolocation for duration of the browser session, e.g. when you need to really use google maps. And after the browser window closes it would later go back to the previously blocked state from before.
It's a cognitive dissonance.