All Chromium browsers including Brave give special access to system/tab CPU/GPU only for Google domains

[Tech-Trooper]

I have not seen that this was discussed before.
For those who don’t wanna go through X,

“Google Chrome gives all *.google.com sites full access to system / tab CPU usage, GPU usage, and memory usage. It also gives access to detailed processor information, and provides a logging backchannel.

This API is not exposed to other sites - only to *.google.com.
Brave also has the same behaviour as Chrome and Edge here. The extension that allows Google to retrieve this information exclusively from *.google.com is also pre-installed in Brave.”

Luca Casonato 🏳️‍🌈 (@lcasdev) on X

[mulled]

Ungoogled Chromium seems to exclude this “feature”.

[starkle]

Brave lets you disable this in its extensions settings, with this toggle.

Always wondered what it did. Glad I always disabled it.

Running this code in the dev console lets you test the API (from a comment on the HN discussion):

chrome.runtime.sendMessage(
    'nkeimhogjdpnpccoofpliimaahmaaome', {
        method: 'cpu.getInfo'
    }, response => {
        console.log('CPU Info:\n', JSON.stringify(response, null, 2));
    }
);

I tested this with the Hangouts extension on and off, and confirmed google sites can get the special info when it’s turned on, and not when turned off.

[Viper]

Ty 4 ur service. no need to uninstall Brave and panic

[jonah (Jonah Aragon)]

We do already tell people to disable that though. I don’t know why Brave doesn’t disable it by default

[ph00lt0 (Mare Polaris)]

Google Hangouts is Back From the Dead to Spy on You

[sha123]

@user12

I even worry to use electron apps just because they are based on chromium

Electron apps are often terrible, but not because of Chromium.

[Tech-Trooper]

Tbh, I have disabled it so far just because it has name Google, but did not know that was the behaviour.

[Valynor]

Brave delivers: