WebSerial was just introduced in Firefox 151. It was already available for 5 years in Chromium based browser. It's so new in Firefox that even caniuse is not up-to-date: https://caniuse.com/web-serial .
Edge has had it for a while too.
Build Adafruit projects right from Firefox
21–30 of 96 posts
Re: Build Adafruit projects right from Firefox
#22what the fuck since when they are allowing webserial / webusb? I've always agreed with the reservations about browsers being able to control peripherals. I'd rather download a python script i can inspect.
You could always just not allow any websites to use these features. They require your permission first.
Re: Build Adafruit projects right from Firefox
#23Feels a bit out of place that the website tries to aggressively make me download Firefox, with multiple links on the site for it. Like it's the 2000's again and I'd need ActiveX or something. But it's to use a standard.
Sure, the standard is cool, have used it to flash Meshtastic to some LoRa boards, before advancing to use VS Code + ESP-IDF to flash in my own LoRa code.
Re: Build Adafruit projects right from Firefox
#24Feels a bit out of place that the website tries to aggressively make me download Firefox, with multiple links on the site for it. Like it's the 2000's again and I'd need ActiveX or something. But it's to use a standard. Sure, the standard is cool, have used it to flash Meshtastic to some LoRa boards, before advancing to use VS Code + ESP-IDF to flash in my own LoRa code.
What makes it aggressive?
Re: Build Adafruit projects right from Firefox
#25WebSerial was just introduced in Firefox 151. It was already available for 5 years in Chromium based browser. It's so new in Firefox that even caniuse is not up-to-date: https://caniuse.com/web-serial .
(I submitted a PR for caniuse a few days ago :-) https://github.com/Fyrd/caniuse/pull/7523 )
Re: Build Adafruit projects right from Firefox
#26Amazing feature for beginners. Is it possible to do this using Arduino?
Yup! Arduino is one of the things I tested with. (I worked on this for Mozilla)
Re: Build Adafruit projects right from Firefox
#27WebUSB next? I would like to be able to configure my keyboard but it can only be done via their website which requires WebUSB.
Re: Build Adafruit projects right from Firefox
#28Great to see Firefox getting on board. I wrote an alternative to Arduino's serial plotter that works in Chrome. Hopefully it's not too hard to get Firefox working too? Patches welcome: https://github.com/skybrian/serialviz
Hopefully it will just work, if not please file a bug! I tested with a variety of hardware and sites but of course I couldn't try everything...
Re: Build Adafruit projects right from Firefox
#29WebSerial was just introduced in Firefox 151. It was already available for 5 years in Chromium based browser. It's so new in Firefox that even caniuse is not up-to-date: https://caniuse.com/web-serial .
Edge has had it for a while too.
In case you don't know, Edge is a "Chromium-based browser" like GP mentioned.
Re: Build Adafruit projects right from Firefox
#30That's a start at improving something. But it won't rid itself of the Playskool/Fisher-Price gimmick factor or have any lasting effect until we can convince JS developers to write their own tools in a standards-compliant dialect and use standardized APIs so that contributors can use the runtime they already have installed instead of being cajoled and browbeaten into installing NodeJS or Bun or Deno or whatever to do…
> do what the browser runtime is perfectly capable of: opening a project directory, executing the code comprising the build script, and outputting the build artifacts when it's done
Unfortunately Firefox doesn't support the FileSystem API so to do this you need to resort to uploading the entire source code directory each time you change a source file.
I understand Firefox's privacy and security first thinking on this, but I think it is misguided. It's led to the webplatform being eclipsed by other, propriety options, or people forced to ship "Chrome-based only" features.