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Comment by ryandrake | Hacker News Reader

> Certain browsers allow YouTube to set the internal resolution of the timer to a lower value

It's wild to me that browsers expose this kind of control over my system to third party developers. I think making the browser an "application platform" was overall a mistake. Call me crazy, but I just want a browser that fetches and displays web sites.

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It may also be interesting for people that browsers have a large list of domains they enable or disable certain behavior for a variety of reasons: https://github.com/WebKit/WebKit/blob/main/Source/WebCore/pa...

I don't quite get your objection here. Is it to the fact that browsers are commonly used to show video, or the fact that smoothly showing video requires changing certain power saving settings?

My objection is that merely visiting a website can invoke all kinds of unexpected things happening on my computer. As a web browser user, I don’t expect it to be modifying how timers work on my system, or accessing peripherals and radios, or programming my GPU or the memory of other processes, or my location, or writing to my filesystem, or basically anything else other than what is needed to draw text and images onto a browser window.

I still don't get your objection. Changing system timer settings is required to show HD videos on a browser window in a smooth way.

Are you objecting to the fact that that's the case or that browser windows are being used to show HD videos?

The browser isn't exposing it to websites. It's simply due to the fact of playing media that it's lowering the minimum timer resolution on Windows. In the past it would also do this when just scrolling among other things if I remember correctly, I'm not sure if it still does this.

Firefox uses a different method that doesn't require lowering the minimum timer resolution.

Either way the global behavior of this is no longer true on modern Windows 10/11 machines (as of Windows 10 2004) as each process must now call timeBeginPeriod if it wants increased timer resolution: https://randomascii.wordpress.com/2020/10/04/windows-timer-r...

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/api/timeapi/...

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