They have decided to not implement it:

https://webkit.org/status/#feature-web-midi

Note that Web Midi isn’t any kind of standard; it’s not even on the standards track. From the specification:

> This document is merely a W3C-internal document. It has no official standing of any kind and does not represent consensus of the W3C Membership.

— https://webaudio.github.io/web-midi-api/

I believe Apple and Mozilla’s position is it can’t be done in a privacy preserving way as currently specified.

WebMIDI support in Firefox is almost complete. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=836897

Finally Mozilla does something sane! This is really great news, and I could see this being a pretty big thing or even a major way of doing web enabled IoT.

I've been regularly checking that page, delighted with every step of progress as WebMIDI gets implemented in Firefox.

In about:config, I have dom.webmidi.enabled set to true. I'm using this test page and waiting for the day it starts working for regular version of Firefox.

https://versioduo.com/webmidi-test/

In Firefox 98.0, it actually works but is well-hidden. You not only have to turn on dom.webmidi.enabled in about:config as you've already done, but also need to manually add 'Access MIDI devices' and 'Access MIDI devices with SysEx support' permissions for the page in Tools -> Page Info before reloading, as otherwise it silently fails instead of prompting for confirmation. Hot-plugging interfaces after the browser is launched also doesn't seem to work yet.

Oh joy! It works - thanks for the tip about manually adding permissions to the page. I'll have fun with this.

No WebUSB either (Or ever I guess), I know some HN people might not be a fan of it but personally I think it has huge potential to cut down on engineering waste. No need to build custom apps for every platform to just interface with a hardware device and also because it's a shared spec makes hardware devices hackable and alternative clients easy to create so devices can live on if their creators companies go under.

WebUSB (and bluetooth and HID and Serial) are not standards. They are Chrome-only non-standards.

Neither Safari nor Firefox are going to implement them.

Firefox is implementing WebMidi so I don't think this idea people are passing around that these are "not real standards" so won't be implemented holds much water.

I was responding to WebUSB, and tacked a few other hardware APIs there. Both Firefox and Safari view them as harmful in their current form. They are not really on a standards track for now, they are "Draft Community Reports" or somesuch.

For something to become a standard that something needs two independent implementations. Before that it's just some browser's prototyping stage, no matter how many times Chrome will tell you otherwise.

According to chromestatus, WebMIDI now has positive position from Mozilla and negative position from Safari: https://chromestatus.com/feature/4923613069180928

Just three years ago Firefox's position was also largely negative due to unresolved security issues: https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/issues/58 It's possible those issues are now resolved, that's why it's making its way into Firefox. This means that Safari's stance may also change.

Same goes for other hardware APIs: from the point of view of both Safari and Firefox those specs have security and privacy holes the size of Jupiter. Not to mention that the quality of some of these so-called specs is very low. If/When these issues are resolved, we may see them implemented in these browsers, too.