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Chrome turning off pocket vibrator

You probably didn't know that other people could turn your phone into a vibrator, because nearly nobody used the feature.

Thank heavens, because after a year-long outrage on Reddit, Google's Chrome developers decided to restrict the feature, “navigator.vibrate”, at least from being called in cross-origin iframes.

The furore started when a Redditor had an advertisement buzz the phone.

Others in the thread complained that the unwanted vibe was associated with the kind of rubbish ads that say “you have 999 unread messages!” or push fake updates (just why those ads get served by Google is a separate question).

It only took until July for devs to recommend navigator.vibrate block cross-origin calls, noting that only 0.00025 per cent of pages use it.

A welcome side-note from the Chromium.org post: there's a feature-policy and permissions project under way, which the post says will “probably ship by the end of the year”.

Hat-tip to @SwiftOnSecurity who noticed the posts. ®

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