Comment by apitman

I've recently been exploring options for allowing web apps to access LAN services. For example, a WebDAV server so you can watch local videos in the app without streaming them through a server.

You can actually achieve a form of discovery if your service registers itself using mDNS for something like `service.local`. Browsers will allow direct navigation/redirection to `http://service.local`, but they'll block any fetch/XHR requests due to mixed content rules, even if you have CORS configured. And of course you can't get a cert for `.local` domains.

Newer things like Chrome's LNA[0] are actually really helpful, because (for now at least) if the user grants the permission, fetch/XHR will go through, but you'll get a bunch of mixed content warnings in the console.

It seems like the only way to fully support this use case currently is with WebRTC, which is pretty sad.

[0]: https://developer.chrome.com/blog/local-network-access