A majority of Chrome's "standard" pushes have the alternate use of better browser fingerprinting. Ones of end users might use WebMIDI to work with musical devices but every scammy AdTech company will use it to fingerprint users. Same with most of their other "standards". It's almost like Google is an AdTech firm that happens to make a web browser.

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leptons 5 days ago | parent [-]

I honestly don't care about fingerprinting. It's too late to worry about that, because there will always be a way to do it, to some extent. And me using a browser with WebMIDI only means I'm one of the 3.4 billion people using Chrome. There are better ways to "fingerprint" people online. Detecting browser APIs is not a particularly good one.

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giantrobot 5 days ago | parent [-]

It's not the presence of WebMIDI that's the problem. It's the devices it can enumerate. Same with their other Web* APIs that want to enumerate devices outside the browser's normal sandboxing.

	▲	leptons 5 days ago \| parent [-]
		So what? You need to give access to each website that wants to interact with WebMIDI. It doesn't just let any website poll the devices. It's no different than the location API or any other API - the user has to explicitly grant access to each website that wants to use the API. If you don't trust the site, don't give it access. It's really as simple as that. Sorry chicken little, the sky is not falling.