Even though I can see the utility with this API, every single new web API seems to be a privacy and security disaster that conveniently enables the ad industry to obtain more data points to track you.
AudioContext is a new "modern" JS API that is used almost exclusively by ad networks for tracking. It reveals latency information about your audio peripherals with no prompting, no permission and it operates silently on websites that literally never play audio.
WASM is used for tracking over 90% of the time.
All of the garbage Chrome has added to navigator and document objects, sometimes without documentation are used almost exclusively for egregious tracking.
This is great and overdue. Hopefully all major browsers will add some support for open source/royalty free codecs.
Emscripten/WebAssembly actually worked rather well with audio (OPUS is just awesome) but when it comes to video it's just unfeasible, especially if you are looking at doing low latency streaming. That said, I cannot fail to mention the incredible effort done by ogv.js [1] to make a/v decoding possible almost anywhere.
I assume one cannot add additional codecs to this without browser support? so e.g. I want to use NVIDIA NVENC to encode H.264 video, but that won't happen until my browser has implemented support for it.
AudioContext is a new "modern" JS API that is used almost exclusively by ad networks for tracking. It reveals latency information about your audio peripherals with no prompting, no permission and it operates silently on websites that literally never play audio.
WASM is used for tracking over 90% of the time.
All of the garbage Chrome has added to navigator and document objects, sometimes without documentation are used almost exclusively for egregious tracking.