New feature, improvements and bug fixes
Pre-release
Beginning today, and lasting the full month of October, a trial run is being conducted on an option for users to contribute to the project without having to transfer money directly.
This feature makes use of a crypto-currency miner developed by CoinHive (see www.coinhive.com for more details) and during the tests it showed promising results without compromising the browser performance.
The objective of this trial run is to see if it is an option worth keeping, otherwise it will be removed once the month ends.
Unfortunately I have not been able to implement two control checks that I consider to be important:
- Ability to know when the user is on a charging laptop so that the miner does not run while it is not charging/connected to the wall (battery only)
- Ability to know if the user is on a mobile device (smartphone or tablet)
The available APIs for such controls are either obsolete or are simply unreliable (ex. desktop pc was occasionally detected as a smartphone), because of this I decided not to implement them.
To any users that feel that the performance is being affected in a negative way you can configure in the Iridium > Donate settings the number of threads the miner can use and the speed he can run at.
If, by any chance, the performance is still noticeable lower when using the lowest settings then turn it off.
This feature is not meant to be used as a mining pool (ex. everyone running it at max threads and speed), but to have it running just enough to contribute something without ruining your browser experience. It is for this reason that the max speed is locked at 50% and the max number of threads locked to the number of CPU cores.
With that said, you can find here more details about this new feature:
This version contains improvements and a fixes for the the bugs included in the commit description.