On Tue, Nov 1, 2016 at 10:09 AM, Chris Pearce <cpea...@mozilla.com> wrote: > It's not just Netflix that the media playback team has used > navigator.buildID in order to validate fixes; we've used it with other large > video sites too. It's invaluable for determining whether a bug has been > fixed in a build. Can we only disable navigator.buildID in release builds? > Don't users on pre-release versions of Firefox update more often, and thus > the buildID changes too rapidly to be useful?
I think it's more important to freeze it on Nightly, because on the Nightly channel fewer users at a given point in time share the same build id than on the release channels. While the build id changes so often that on Nightly it's not useful for a given site doing longitudinal tracking (beyond the fact that the user uses Nightly, which is visible from the UA string), the Nightly build id enables rather precise correlation of Nightly user identity across multiple sites (that include a third-party tracker) during as browsing session. I see that there can be value to debugging e.g. YouTube issues, but I still think we should return a frozen value to the Web in general, including YouTube. What makes Netflix different from YouTube is, of course, that a) you can't use Netflix in a meaningful way without identifying yourself via a credit card, b) Netflix content isn't embedded on third-party sites and c) Netflix isn't (AFAIK) in the ad business. If we think it's not OK to give Netflix special treatment on principle, let's freeze the id altogether, including for Netflix. -- Henri Sivonen hsivo...@hsivonen.fi https://hsivonen.fi/ _______________________________________________ dev-platform mailing list dev-platform@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform
