alt Hacker NewsWebUSB has been used by projects like GrapheneOS, ESPHome, and Meshtastic. Google has used WebUSB to let users convert Stadia controllers to regular bluetooth input devices. Some manufacturers of keyboards use WebUSB for their configuration utilities.
It's an incredibly useful API, and it's secure. You have to explicitly pick a device to give access to. Mozilla's attitude in refusing to natively implement it seems neither reasonable nor rational. Though that is unfortunately on-par with what I've come to expect from them over the past ten or so years.
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hulitu • today at 6:04 AM
> It's an incredibly useful API, and it's secure.
Citation needed. Web browsers, with their many CVEs, do not look like the pinnacle of security.
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Honestly, an extension seems like the perfect solution for this. Wanting a website to access your USB stack directly (or Bluetooth, which has a similar standard) is such an extremely niche use case that it’s probably better for it to be available only as an opt-in extension. They can still standardize it, but… let me just not have it by default please.
On iOS, there’s a “Bluetooth browser” app which is basically a simple WebView-based browser, but with the Bluetooth JS spec implemented so that you can use it to configure whatever Bluetooth device you have that wants to use a webapp for configuration. And you know what? That’s fine. It’s perfect, actually. A separate app I can use for the 0.0001% of the time I actually need to interact with some random IoT device’s Bluetooth configuration UI, and my normal web browser doesn’t need the bloat and increased attack surface. It just seems like good engineering to me to do it this way.
More of the enormous bloated JS web API specs should be implemented as browser plugins. Let’s make the default footprint even smaller.