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Chrome ships WebGPU

developer.chrome.com

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Re: Chrome ships WebGPU

#371

Post by illiarian »

notatoad wrote: post #362
illiarian wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> i want the chrome apps model to come back - put your permission requests in a manifest, and when the user clicks and install button the app gets its permissions. So you will get the Android case where flashlight apps where asking for everything, including location data and contact access, and people were giving it to them

you can't protect everybody from themselves all the time. some people are just gonna agree to everything, and you can't stop it. don't ruin apps for everybody just because some guy who couldn't care less shared some data with an app you think they shouldn't have.

> you can't protect everybody from themselves all the time.

It's not an either-or thing. There are multiple levels to security, and just shoving everything into one big prompt, and letting users deal with it ain't it.

Re: Chrome ships WebGPU

#372

Post by jefftk »

illiarian wrote: post #365
jefftk wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google Ads, 2020-07-31: What is not acceptable is the use of opaque or hidden techniques that transfer data about individual users and allow them to be tracked in a covert manner, such as fingerprinting. We believe that any attempts to track people or obtain information that could identify them, without their knowledge and permission, should be blocked. We’ll continue to take a strong position against these practices…

1. In the context of browsers Google's competitors are Safari and Firefox. And in this context Google is always consistently behind: either unwilling to implement the same privacy protections, or implementing them years later, or coming up with non-solutions 2. It's funny how you link to a Google propaganda piece on FLoC. Whereas Google's competitors (context: browsers) actually try to reduce fingerprinting, tracking…

If you're trying to understand what Google's doing here and what their incentives are, it's important to distinguish between tracking in general and specifically using fingerprinting to track. They're very interested in showing people relevant ads based on their history, but only in ways where users have some control. With the traditional approach of third-party cookies, for example, the user can clear some or all cookies, open a private browsing window, or use extensions to limit what cookies are sent/received where. With fingerprinting, however, the user has no control: if I clear cookies I'll still have the same fingerprint, and I can't tell the web to forget me anymore. Same if I open a private browsing window, close it, and open it again. We started this thread with the question of whether Chrome adding an API that increased the fingerprinting surface benefited Google, and I've been arguing no: as shown in my quotes above Google has committed not to use fingerprinting.

Your (1) and (2) are about tracking in general and not fingerprinting. On (1), I agree that Google is behind. This is explicitly a strategy to (a) protect ads monetization and (b) avoid a situation where you turn off third party cookies only to have advertisers move to something worse (see: being anti-fingerprinting):

After initial dialogue with the web community, we are confident that with continued iteration and feedback, privacy-preserving and open-standard mechanisms like the Privacy Sandbox can sustain a healthy, ad-supported web in a way that will render third-party cookies obsolete. Once these approaches have addressed the needs of users, publishers, and advertisers, and we have developed the tools to mitigate workarounds, we plan to phase out support for third-party cookies in Chrome. -- https://blog.chromium.org/2020/01/building-more-private-web-...

On (2), while FLoC abandoned the successor, Topics, is still moving forward: https://developer.chrome.com/docs/privacy-sandbox/topics/ Note that unlike FLoC it only observes pages where the page calls "document.browsingTopics()". I don't see how FLoC or Topics represent trying to "have the cake and eat it too" -- they're explicitly attempts to move user interest tracking from the server to the client, to address some of the privacy issues people have with server-side tracking.

On "literally: 80% of its money comes from targeted advertising" that's wrong? The vast majority of Google's income is from ads, yes, but it's mostly from search ads, which aren't targeted.

(I used to work in this area at Google; speaking only for myself)

Re: Chrome ships WebGPU

#373

Post by xchkr1337 »

pjmlp wrote: post #369
xchkr1337 wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most current shader languages are very close to C in terms of syntax and behavior and these are some of the worst aspects of C as a language. I guess they could have went with SPIR-V but generally a compilation step shouldn't be required in web standards.

MSL, HLSL and PSSL are C++ dialects.

Literally all of these are owned by big corporations (Apple, Microsoft, Sony) and made specifically for their proprietary gpu APIs. C++ is just a superset of C which doesn't fix syntax problems. Making an open source standard with a modern syntax is a better idea than picking a favorite corporation.

Re: Chrome ships WebGPU

#374

Post by mike_hock »

Timja wrote: post #30
mike_hock wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And to prevent device fingerprinting, all the operations are specified to deterministically produce the same bit-exact results on all hardware, and the feature set is fixed without any support for extensions, right? Or is this yet another information leak anti-feature that we need to disable?

There is no way to escape fingerprinting. Just one example: A script which runs many different types of computations. Each computation will take a certain amount of time depending on your hardware and software. So you will get a fingerprint like this: computation 1: ** computation 2: **** computation 3: ********** computation 4: ** computation 5: ************** computation 6: ************ computation 7: ********* etc…

You can reduce clock precision, which has already been done to mitigate speculative execution attacks. You can delay network requests to prevent the JS from using the server as a more precise clock. In addition to random delays, you can quantize execution times by only responding in 100ms increments, for example. You can do lots of things to mitigate fingerprinting, if not completely prevent it.

But then you could also just omit features that have no reason to exist in the first place.

Re: Chrome ships WebGPU

#375

Post by pjmlp »

xchkr1337 wrote: post #373
pjmlp wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

MSL, HLSL and PSSL are C++ dialects.

Literally all of these are owned by big corporations (Apple, Microsoft, Sony) and made specifically for their proprietary gpu APIs. C++ is just a superset of C which doesn't fix syntax problems. Making an open source standard with a modern syntax is a better idea than picking a favorite corporation.

Guess what is the main shading language used in Vulkan, specially going forward as announced at Vulkanised 2023.

C++ is a safer, more expressive superset of C89.

Also those dialects aren't C++, they are based in C++, which isn't the same.

Re: Chrome ships WebGPU

#376

Post by detuur »

pjmlp wrote: post #366
pdpi wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We live in a bubble where we don't notice it, but desktop as a platform is... not dying exactly, but maybe returning to 90s levels of popularity. Common enough, but something tech-minded people use, and not necessarily for everybody. Mobile is rapidly becoming the ubiquitous computing paradigm we all thought desktop computers would be. In that world, WebGPU is much more important on mobile than on desktop.

Desktop is pretty much alive, it is called laptops. My Thinkpad P80 + docking station doesn't own anything to classical desktops.

A chromebook, internally, is more a mobile device than a "real" computer. Plenty of high school kids today will own their first real computer when they go to college. Until then, most of their computing is done their iPhone or iPad, and perhaps their school-issued chromebook.

We see this issue with kids of their generation entering the workforce with a lack of basic computer skills, or CS students in college who have to be explained the concept of a hierarchical file/directory structure.

Re: Chrome ships WebGPU

#377

Post by amelius »

mike_hock wrote: post #374
Timja wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no way to escape fingerprinting. Just one example: A script which runs many different types of computations. Each computation will take a certain amount of time depending on your hardware and software. So you will get a fingerprint like this: computation 1: ** computation 2: **** computation 3: ********** computation 4: ** computation 5: ************** computation 6: ************ computation 7: ********* etc…

You can reduce clock precision, which has already been done to mitigate speculative execution attacks. You can delay network requests to prevent the JS from using the server as a more precise clock. In addition to random delays, you can quantize execution times by only responding in 100ms increments, for example. You can do lots of things to mitigate fingerprinting, if not completely prevent it. But then you could al…

Or everybody can just buy the same (i)Phone :)

Re: Chrome ships WebGPU

#378

Post by pjmlp »

detuur wrote: post #376
pjmlp wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Desktop is pretty much alive, it is called laptops. My Thinkpad P80 + docking station doesn't own anything to classical desktops.

A chromebook, internally, is more a mobile device than a "real" computer. Plenty of high school kids today will own their first real computer when they go to college. Until then, most of their computing is done their iPhone or iPad, and perhaps their school-issued chromebook. We see this issue with kids of their generation entering the workforce with a lack of basic computer skills, or CS students in college who have…

Chromebooks are only relevant in US school system, and even then, there is Crostini.

Most schools around the world don't issue laptops to students.

Re: Chrome ships WebGPU

#379

Post by danans »

detuur wrote: post #376
pjmlp wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Desktop is pretty much alive, it is called laptops. My Thinkpad P80 + docking station doesn't own anything to classical desktops.

A chromebook, internally, is more a mobile device than a "real" computer. Plenty of high school kids today will own their first real computer when they go to college. Until then, most of their computing is done their iPhone or iPad, and perhaps their school-issued chromebook. We see this issue with kids of their generation entering the workforce with a lack of basic computer skills, or CS students in college who have…

> A chromebook, internally, is more a mobile device than a "real" computer

How is that? And if so how am I typing this on an Intel i5 Chromebook with 16G RAM that is hosting a Linux VM? If upgradeability is the issue, Framework's Chromebook is completely upgradeable.

Re: Chrome ships WebGPU

#380

Post by whitehexagon »

illiarian wrote: post #39
tormeh wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really. I don't see how any of the vendors could break it without being extremely overt about it. And it has no direct competition. Nothing else runs on any OS and any GPU, except WebGL, which is abandoned.

> I don't see how any of the vendors could break it without being extremely overt about it. > except WebGL, which is abandoned. So it can be abandoned

Pretty impressed with WebGL2, and it is already on most platforms, so I hope it wont be pushed aside by this. I assumed WebGPU was going to be more about a Web based OpenCL implementation, is OpenCL also being pushed aside by this then? and wasnt there a plan to do some compute with WebGL? I cant keep up! I hope this myriad of new Chrome APIs being pushed slows down enough for some new browser vendors to enter the market. Or is this just a push for a new 'native' browser experience single horse race...
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