Comment by gear54rus
1 day ago
And I'll just fire up a chrome instance which I specifically keep for when my daily driver firefox decides to spazz out and not implement basics in 2026 :'(
1 day ago
And I'll just fire up a chrome instance which I specifically keep for when my daily driver firefox decides to spazz out and not implement basics in 2026 :'(
Are you calling WebUSB a basic feature? Because I'm willing to discuss whether we should have it, but that seems like an exaggeration.
How do you make sure that technically illiterate people don't just click away the requestDevice() popup? IMHO a browser offering device level USB access is a security nightmare and there is no way this can ever be made safe and convenient at the same time.
Isn't that the same excuse Gooogle is using to lrevent folks from installing what they want on Android phones?
Essentially, yeah.
I do not agree with Google on preventing apk installation. But unknown apk is a different risk profile than letting unknown entities to access local usb devices.
The main issue in the former case is that google is posing itself as a gatekeeper instead of following a repo model like Debian or FreeBSD. That’s wanting control over people’s device.
Allowing USB access is just asking to break the browser sandbox, by equating the browser with the operating system.
You can ask them to type one of the following sentences:
"I know what I'm doing, and giving a random website access to my USB host is the right thing to do."
"I'm an idiot."
I love this because the idiots would type out that they know what they're doing and the pros would save time by typing "I'm an idiot."
1 reply →
You simply don't. This quest of saving idiots from themselves is not gaining anyone anything and meanwhile other people get more and more useless restrictions.
Or you can just not give a loaded shotgun to every browser user on the off chance they need to interact with 1 (one) usb device per year.
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I'm tired of my computing being kneecapped in service of incompetent boomers. Enough is enough. If they're going to fall for dumb scams let them.
They can click everything away, so maybe educate them or buy an ios device for your relatives instead of breaking computing for everyone else.
> breaking computing for everyone else
How is not implementing a Draft spec, which may compromise security badly, breaking computing?
Overreacting much?
5 replies →
Fair, but remember that we are the <~1% of people who even know what webusb is. I'm not sure I share your view on this.
Maybe an about:config switch to enable it would be enough to stop casuals from pwning their peripherals.
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> They can click everything away, so maybe
So maybe don't populate the browser with dozens of features requiring permission popups?