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Chromium devs want the browser to talk to devices, computers directly

theregister.com

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Re: Chromium devs want the browser to talk to devices, computers directly

#71

Post by DangitBobby »

jart wrote: post #40

Could we please just fix native software development, so it doesn't suck, rather than adding the kitchen sink to web browsers? Web pages and JavaScript are the only universally trusted medium for sharing information and simple software. Making it possible for news websites to touch ethernet/usb/serial/gpu compromises that. Same goes for optimizations ilke JIT'ing and WebAssembly which have certainly done a great job…

Do you want to 1) do difficult and frustrating plumbing work to fix what's already here and slightly broken or 2) design and make a new generation of things with your goals and your own tools? Which one sounds more like a career that results in dying young due to extreme boredom and head-desk trauma?

Re: Chromium devs want the browser to talk to devices, computers directly

#72

Post by sayusasugi »

Guys, "The Birth & Death of JavaScript" was supposed to be a joke. In all seriousness though, I'm beginning to get tired of webdevs reading OS books and going "oh, this would be a great addition to The Web™". Slap "in the browser" after a feature all operating systems have supported for decades and you'll hit the front page of HN in no time. What's old is new again and all that.

Re: Chromium devs want the browser to talk to devices, computers directly

#73

Post by 3747yreur »

nikkwong wrote: post #50
skywhopper wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, we have decades of evidence (including state of the art tech, right now, today) that argues against your optimistic scenario. In fact, Chrome is basically a piece of spyware as is. Google has no incentive to protect your privacy. How much worse will it get if the browser can reach into your LAN?

Yeah I agree. The browser does seem to be the preeminent attack vector since it's the easiest way for actors to reach into your systems. I can imagine the next generation of ransomware where your smart devices are held hostage for small-ish ransoms. To your point about privacy, yeah I also agree. I think the real evil here is how implicit the exploitation of trust is with using Chrome and Google services. Ideally the…

>I come from the Chinese mindset where privacy doesn't have the capital P like it does in the US. Most Chinese are fine with the government and private industry infiltrating their lives if the net effect is that their lives are improved. Most Americans don't care either and it's always weird to me how many mental gymnastics the American tech community will go through not to acknowledge it. The argument I hear is always some mix of exploitation or informed consent. But then you'll also be given evidence from things like the Snowden leak claiming that the controversey there shows how many people care (the same people who don't understand the topic well enough to form 'correct' opinions) and if you're expecting evidence of consumers being damaged in a real way then you're out of luck.

The reality is that most Americans don't care, they might be a little nervous because of the fear campaigns being waged but overall they prefer having useful tech products. The only people who want worse tech products are activists and the Europeans.

Re: Chromium devs want the browser to talk to devices, computers directly

#74

Post by thwarted »

rubber_duck wrote: post #67
thwarted wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imagine if major OS platforms had a common UI framework that any language can produce a UI This has been attempted a number of times, both in the browser and without, and it always comes down to people complaining that the widget set isn't "native" in look and feel and operation, and the pendulum swings back the other way. People used to complain that browser widgets didn't confirm to the OS's UI guidelines. Then you…

Umm - a large group of most popular productivity apps are cross platform and look nothing like native - from dev tools like IDEA, VSCode over Slack, MS Office, to multimedia tools like Adobe tools, almost all 3D modeling software like maya, max, audio software like Ableton, FL. None of the apps I use on a day to day basis look native (ie. like the apps provided by Apple) You are confusing cross platform UI with frame…

If MS Office was truly cross platform in look, feel, and operation, then finance people who insist on using Excel wouldn't also insist on using Windows just to use Excel.

All those specialized tools can get away with having completely-unlike-anything else UI/UX because people are paying for them and they are considered best(and only)-of-breed.

Electron apps are cross platform only in terms of them looking alike on different platforms, because they use the same widget set. If slack was a truly, full native app on OSX, it wouldn't look like it does.

Re: Chromium devs want the browser to talk to devices, computers directly

#75

Post by rubber_duck »

thwarted wrote: post #74
rubber_duck wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Umm - a large group of most popular productivity apps are cross platform and look nothing like native - from dev tools like IDEA, VSCode over Slack, MS Office, to multimedia tools like Adobe tools, almost all 3D modeling software like maya, max, audio software like Ableton, FL. None of the apps I use on a day to day basis look native (ie. like the apps provided by Apple) You are confusing cross platform UI with frame…

If MS Office was truly cross platform in look, feel, and operation, then finance people who insist on using Excel wouldn't also insist on using Windows just to use Excel. All those specialized tools can get away with having completely-unlike-anything else UI/UX because people are paying for them and they are considered best(and only)-of-breed. Electron apps are cross platform only in terms of them looking alike on di…

I don't know enough about Excel but I highly doubt it's about the looks - I have Office installed on my MBP and the ribbon looks like I remember it from Windows.

I don't understand your point - non-native widgets are not a deal breaker and there are plenty of examples, Electron being the most common non-native cross platform framework recently (it has technical limitations but even the subpar performance doesn't make it a deal-breaker). So it's possible to create cross-platform UI frameworks and most of the the most successful apps I can think of are using some version.

Re: Chromium devs want the browser to talk to devices, computers directly

#76

Post by chmod775 »

Have they even fixed websocket portscanning, canvas/audio/font fingerprinting, their crippled request blocking API etc. etc. before coming up with this new privacy and security nightmare?

Can we maybe have a breather?

There must be something about the term sandboxed environment that makes people want to poke holes in it.

Re: Chromium devs want the browser to talk to devices, computers directly

#77

Post by giancarlostoro »

jart wrote: post #68
giancarlostoro wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I certainly would not want my binaries to be 200megs with Electron. We're discussing how to avoid this overhead.

You asked me how to avoid the overhead of Electron and I suggested you try αcτµαlly pδrταblε εxεcµταblε since the distributables are 10,000x smaller. If it's not possible to meet your requirements using a command line c program, or a web application that runs in the browser, then could you help me understand why you need electron?

I'm not advocating for Electron... I think either you're misunderstanding me or we're misunderstanding each other (quite possible as well).

I'm advocating for some small cross-platform cross-language API / runtime / framework (not sure what it looks like, but since most languages are targetting WASM (if this is what's making you think I'm advocating for Electron... then you missed my commentary about people making stand alone WASM runtimes) as opposed to solutions that are platform or language specific, and when I say platform specific lump in web (which means Electron too) in that bucket.

What most people want is to be able to use their own preferred language and do a UI without having to import a bunch of C or C++ libraries that will add additional overhead over their language.

Edit: Just saw the post you were referring to, it would of made more sense had you linked to it:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24256883

While this answers the 1 binary problem while producing a rather massive executable file larger than Electron in many cases, this still doesn't solve the problem I'm mentioning: We need a cross-platform cross-language UI solution. If you want to do away with things like Electron, you need to consider all platforms and all languages.

Re: Chromium devs want the browser to talk to devices, computers directly

#78

Post by wdr1 »

I would have loved this in 2008 for the Beijing Olympics. My team created the point of sale, which included printing specialized tickets on specialized printers. These were going to be deployed across 1,000+ Bank of China locations, including many in pretty remote regions.

Instead, we created an applet to handle the IO with the printer. It was a nightmare. All sorts of little differences between Windows XP & JRE made it ridiculous hard to debug. While the banks were given exact specs, the culture was such that whenever they would have a problem, they insist the machine was the right spec, which wasn't true 90% of the time.

Re: Chromium devs want the browser to talk to devices, computers directly

#79

Post by nobodyandproud »

zepto wrote: post #42
nobodyandproud wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The cynicism isn’t fully appreciated, if the optimistic scenario is assumed. Security is hard, and exposing more by default (or making it defacto required) is simply asking for trouble.

It’s funny - in the arguments about Apple and the App Store, I’ve seen plenty of people making the opposite case - ‘it’s not scary out there’, the security benefits of the App Store are ‘bullshit’, etc.

Using both I prefer Apple’s philosophy.

I like Google’s stock phone and features more, but I like that Apple is strict about about something that has my personal info.

It’s worth the money.

Re: Chromium devs want the browser to talk to devices, computers directly

#80

Post by nikkwong »

mr_toad wrote: post #65
nikkwong wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I agree. The browser does seem to be the preeminent attack vector since it's the easiest way for actors to reach into your systems. I can imagine the next generation of ransomware where your smart devices are held hostage for small-ish ransoms. To your point about privacy, yeah I also agree. I think the real evil here is how implicit the exploitation of trust is with using Chrome and Google services. Ideally the…

> your smart devices are held hostage for small-ish ransoms. I thought the vendors did this already. But maybe the ransomware developers will do a better job supporting the smart devices than the actual vendors.

Hahah. That made me laugh out loud. The idea of having a more open standard to be able to talk to devices in other people's houses is an a pandora's box; but I could also see a lot of interesting use cases. I'm just toying with the idea of warming the color temperature of the lights in my parent's house at night to help them sleep (since I can't get them to care enough themselves). Or think about some type of live poster that your circle of friends streams content to. I'm sure there are tons of interesting possibilities.
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