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What is the point of all the information given out by your browser?
(literature.cafe)
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this post was submitted on 23 May 2026
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No Stupid Questions
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There is no such thing as a Stupid Question!
Don't be embarrassed of your curiosity; everyone has questions that they may feel uncomfortable asking certain people, so this place gives you a nice area not to be judged about asking it. Everyone here is willing to help.
- ex. How do I change oil
- ex. How to tie shoes
- ex. Can you cry underwater?
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Most of these things actually are purely client side. But nothing can prevent the website from sending that information back to the server.
Or they can be inferred from the client behaviour. Like you said from the GPU capabilities you can get to the actual hardware. If a client only downloads the dark mode CSS it knows which mode the user is currently on.
Why do you think a client should have to download a dark mode CSS separately? Have you put any thought into why that is treated as a separate request, rather than a function of an existing page that could be switched between offline without any acknowledgement sent from the client?
Web standards have been butchered to force these constant validation measures for the sole purpose of telemetry/spyware. A client should be able to render a web page however the fuck it wants and the server that sent the page should be none the wiser.
And what of things like battery status? That has no legitimate purpose at all. No web site is going to change its behavior in response to your battery status, but current charge % and battery wear stats alone are enough to perfectly distinguish your mobile device from anyone else that you would be sharing a IP address with.
Don't shoot the messenger, that's just how these things are.
And it actually is possible to put all the light and dark mode stuff into one place and switch on the fly without any additional downloads but then people would complain about having to download stuff they don't need on their end. And if the site showed different images depending on light and dark they would again be able to figure it out.
Most of these APIs were added when more and more applications were built on the web. You can even access USB-devices from the web.
I'm not saying these things are good. Just that there definitely were reasons beyond telemetry for creating them.