WebUSB Extension for Firefox

59 points37 comments3 hours ago
nezza-_-

WebUSB is so great.

I can ship a cross-platform application that accesses a hardware device without having to deal with all the platform specifics, and with decent sandboxing of my driver.

I think one way to make it more "secure" against unwitting users would be to only support WebUSB for devices that have a WebUSB descriptor - would allow "origin" checking.

sva_

I recently flashed GrapheneOS on a Pixel for a friend. I was very surprised that you can do this entire process from the browser using WebUSB - the only downside being that it required me to launch Chromium.

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Zopieux

And Web Serial reached mainline Firefox last week.

I hope Mozilla can eventually stop playing their silly role in the security theater of “but what if our users are dumb” and actually deliver those "power-user" features that would allow me to uninstall Chrome for good. Oh, and also, --app= flag please.

afavour

Looks to be a great proof of concept. No, running a standalone executable alongside the browser is not the way you'd want to do WebUSB. But it's great to see someone working on it.

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Orygin

No thanks. I'll accept it in my browser when they fix the security implications this raises, and when the Spec is no longer in draft.

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shevy-java

Can't Mozilla hand over Firefox to another team?