I'm thinking of HTML5 media tags. There's a standard way to specify that something is a piece of media to play, but the browser needs to also have the right codec for that media.

There could be something similar for USB, where there might not even be any "codecs" (drivers) included by default in browsers, but where there's a defined method of making USB devices available.

You'd still have to install a plugin for each device type that your browser doesn't natively understand, but standardization for how to make specific device types available to the browser would be much simpler. And there could be "rewriting proxy" drivers available for improved security which limits what requests that are possible, preventing most hardware exploits.

Although this might still be too much work for little gain.

If you need to install a plugin, why not install an app? Presumably plugins will need to be written for each different browser, just as apps need to be written for each different OS. So there would be very little gain.

> Why should we build this functionality into the browser? Is it really that much more convenient than installing an app to run the proxy?

Apparently it is, given how highly requested of a feature it is to have everything you could do with VMRC available through the web browser with no plugins or local software.

Again, I still don't think it's a good idea either, but I also don't like a lot of the crazy shit built into modern web browsers for maybe the 1% users, like the mentioned WebMIDI.