Good catch. Still, doesn’t make it true either: it’s not such a “fundamental use case” that it would even require the capability. The browser already reports the usable information in the user agent (you rarely even in that 1% need more specificity than “Windows” on “Desktop Intel”).

No. It should be made available with a permission, because not every site out there is going to offer you to download binaries. 1% of the web “”“requiring”“” this does not justify 99% of the web being able to violate that privacy.

Operating system and CPU architecture are useful for sites to serve the correct binaries when a user is downloading an application.

Barely. You could trim down the data to incredibly low granularity (“OS: Windows”, “CPU: Intel Desktop”) and you’d still get the exact same binary as 99% of the people 99% of the time, anyway.

No need to report any sort of even remotely precise value then. Just report “low” or “high”. Also it’s bold of you to assume that just because I am plugged to the wall I want to be served 400 MB of exta javascript and MPEG4 instead of one CSS file and a simple PNG.

One of the biggest reasons websites need to run JS is submitting form data to a server. Like this website.

No. Forms function quite perfectly without JS thanks to action=.

Now whether you want to get “desktop app” fancy with forms and pretend you are a “first-class desktop citizen” that’s a skill issue. But submitting form data, by itself, has not required JS since at least 1979. Maybe earlier.

They can stop telegraphing some of this information, but then the websites won’t render properly (they use this information to display the website properly),

Pretty much none of the information is necessary to ever render a site properly.

OS and CPU architecture? Ireelevant to whether you are sending a JPG or PNG background. Nearly irrelevant to whether you are using a vertical or horizontal screen (and browsers adverstise that info separately anyway, it’s even part of CSS media queries).

Accelerometer and gyroscope? The only reason that could ever be needed for rendering is if the user is moving so incredibly fast that red pixels in their screen would become green due to shifting. And in any time between 2025 and 2999, if you have someone moving that fast, you have worse problems than the site not rendering adequately.

Keyboard layout? If the rendering of a site depends on whether I’m pulsing “g” vs “j” while it loads, then that’s quite stupid anyway because that boldly assumes the app focus is on the page.

Proximity sensor? Again: absolutely useless unless rendering environment moving at incredibly superhigh speed (at which the sensor might be reading data wrong anyway).