WebSerial just landed in Firefox nightly! https://bsky.app/profile/paulusschoutsen.nl/post/3mjfdx3ujta...

> It just puts them behind for some stuff.

Yeah, it really undermines their ability to compromise user security and privacy.

Essentially all of Firefox' incompatibilities with a website reduce to Firefox not allowing the users to be tracked or fingerprinted by default. Webapps that rely on fingerprinting as a replacement for device tokens will likely not work. Because fingerprinting is bad and I don't want it to work. The people your bank pays to implement that are the same companies used for cross site tracking. It only works because tracking works. ReCaptcha can break for similar reasons, but there are better options for captcha and the need for captcha itself is possible to eliminate with various strategies depending on what it is being used to mitigate.

There's a lot of good use-cases of Web usb, you can't just cut everything which might have privacy aspects otherwise the browsers wouldn't have canvas or even gpu rendering.

There's a reason that https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/canvasblocker... exists, though; a reasonable person could argue that firefox should be restricting canvas/gpu more than it does.

What are those use cases? It seems like a giant hole punched all the way from a tab's sandbox through the process boundary and out to the kernel... Yes, gpu rendering is a great example of the same problem. Canvas at least has some intervening layers depending on implementation.

Almost all of the gui software for programming keyboards with QMK uses webusb or webhid, so you either have to use a chromium based browser or an electron app that is basically just a wrapper for chromium.

Yeah, it's a shame Qt/C++ doesn't have any way of interacting with USB devices and there's no libraries for that, otherwise there could be a native GUI app for QMK. Or failing that, because Qt is simply too difficult for programmers to figure out, maybe some day there will be a way to deal with USB devices from Java, then at least we could have an AWT app (or I guess Swing is the new hotness now?).

Yeah the fundamental problem is there isn't a good way to write cross platform applications that interface directly with a usb device

pianu.com used to be a website where you could learn piano by connecting your piano through usb with the browser. It seems defunct now but I found a video demonstrating it : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kTBmRV02NgI

I used something similar in the past. It was a legitimate use case for web usb which changed my mind on it quite a bit.

https://www.charachorder.com/ sells ergo keyboards and allows you to update their firmware directly in the website, through web usb. No local apps at all. Also an improvement in overall security from having to download some .exe / .dmg and running it locally.

GrapheneOS for example can install with web usb, I think it makes it much easier for people who aren't too tech savvy to switch.

Somebody also recently shared an awesome project which let's you use an usb printer regardless of your OS driver.

It is so frustrating how every thread about Mozilla has people getting upset about contradictory things.

Half the thread impunes Mozilla for taking so much money from Google and imply that they are controlled opposition, and the other half gets upset when Mozilla doesn't implement every standard that Google tries to steamroll through the standards bodies because of objections to how they can be used for fingerprinting, or complains that the attempts at anti-fingerprinting break websites, etc.

Sometimes it's not even different people, it's the same people punching them for contradictory reasons.

Mozilla is not perfect but they get all the downsides of being methodical and privacy focused alongside none of the benefits. Everybody hates the "side projects" unless it's Rust, Servo, LetsEncrypt, Thunderbird, contributions to Opus/AVI, etc. and you can be sure they'll be criticized if they "focus" by touching investment in any of those by the same people.

> Half the thread impunes Mozilla for taking so much money from Google and imply that they are controlled opposition, and the other half gets upset when Mozilla doesn't implement every standard that Google tries to steamroll through the standards bodies because of objections to how they can be used for fingerprinting, or complains that the attempts at anti-fingerprinting break websites, etc.

> Half the thread impunes Mozilla for taking so much money from Google and imply that they are controlled opposition, and the other half gets upset when Mozilla doesn't implement every standard that Google tries to steamroll through the standards bodies because of objections to how they can be used for fingerprinting, or complains that the attempts at anti-fingerprinting break websites, etc.

Yeah, double standards at its max. Firefox inputs every privacy concerns for these APIs that Google puts 0 Vietnam Dong to care about users' privacy. And those people cry about why Firefox doesn't implement it.

Okay, I'll give you that. Granted, I've used webUSB exactly twice, once with a Flipper zero and once with a mechanical keyboard. If that's the worst of it, the parent comment calling it "painful and immediately apparent" seems a bit dramatic to me.