The issue with Web Serial is it's not available for Android. Because for some dumb reason, android apps can't access /dev/ttyUSBx, even if kernel exposes them. But then can access raw USB devices. That's really weird. But if you need to access USB serial device in an android, you need to implement FTDI proprietary protocol or whatever adapter you're using by hand.
reply>And Web Serial reached mainline Firefox last week.
replyThat's good news. I wish FF wasn't so conservative... they're missing a lot of cool APIs. Sometimes I wonder who they think their audience is. I suppose they would know better than I would.
I think they see privacy as one of their primary valueadds, and are concerned about the privacy implications with exposing a (PAN) network to the internet that probably wasn't designed to be exposed to such an adversarial environment.
reply> their silly role in the security theater of “but what if our users are dumb”
replyIt's not security theater. If you go to Chromium settings -> Site settings -> permissions, and expand "additional permissions", you will see a total of 26 different permissions, each gated by the same generic "you want to use this" popup.
Permission popup fatigue is quite real, and not a security theater. And that's on top of the usual questions of implementation complexity etc.
They should just add a "Security Console", with black background and green text, and a simple shell interface for enabling/disabling flags that gate whether these requests are automatically denied or create a permissions popup. Anything dangerous starts disable by default.
replyShort of crippling capabilities to save dumb users, the best we can do is make the process scary enough that Grandma won't do it without calling her grandson first.
Yup, I would agree to an about:config
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