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Build Adafruit projects right from Firefox

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Re: Build Adafruit projects right from Firefox

#61

Post by iolo »

maxlin wrote: post #23

Feels 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.

> Feels a bit out of place that the website tries to aggressively make me download Firefox

It's firefox.com, feels like the perfect place to encourage people to download Firefox. That would be like going to a car dealership and being put off by people trying to sell you a car

Re: Build Adafruit projects right from Firefox

#63

Post by kotaKat »

maxlin wrote: post #23

Feels 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.

it feels more out of place that it's a specific company getting to shove their name up as priority billing for the feature when this entire page should be focusing more on WebSerial support being in Firefox as a whole and not one dude's little devboard company.

Re: Build Adafruit projects right from Firefox

#64

Post by jwr »

greyface- wrote: post #20

Mozilla's response to "Request for Mozilla Position on an Emerging Web Specification", June 2020: > For raw device access as envisioned in a number of APIs (Web USB, Web Bluetooth, Web NFC, and Web MIDI), the risks of exposing those APIs to users cannot be reasonably conveyed. This is pretty much an intractable flaw of allowing raw, non-semantic access to devices regardless of the protocol used to do so. > The specif…

I think that response increasingly makes no sense (as time passes). Mozilla prevents people from building apps that access their devices because it might be possible to do something malicious.

I am so tired of being treated like a drooling idiot "for my own good".

Re: Build Adafruit projects right from Firefox

#65

Post by mort96 »

jwr wrote: post #64
greyface- wrote: post #20

Mozilla's response to "Request for Mozilla Position on an Emerging Web Specification", June 2020: > For raw device access as envisioned in a number of APIs (Web USB, Web Bluetooth, Web NFC, and Web MIDI), the risks of exposing those APIs to users cannot be reasonably conveyed. This is pretty much an intractable flaw of allowing raw, non-semantic access to devices regardless of the protocol used to do so. > The specif…

I think that response increasingly makes no sense (as time passes). Mozilla prevents people from building apps that access their devices because it might be possible to do something malicious. I am so tired of being treated like a drooling idiot "for my own good".

The worry is real: there has historically not been a meaningful security barrier between a USB device and software running on the machine it's connected to. Firmware hasn't been developed with the assumption that the machine is malicious, there's probably lots of firmware which you can get RCE on by sending a weirdly formatted USB packet. Lots of devices have pretty unrestricted firmware update via USB functionality. And security is often fairly lax the other direction too; at least Linux implicitly assumes that hardware you connect is trusted, and there are lots of old, insecure drivers for USB devices out there.

Do users understand that by clicking "allow" on a website, an attacker can re-flash their mouse with firmware which causes the mouse to present itself as some obscure USB device which activates a vulnerable driver? That by clicking "allow" on a pop-up from a website, the website can abuse their keyboard to install a key logger or botnet? Should a user be expected to understand this?

I don't know how valid this fear is in practice. Has anyone done a study?

Re: Build Adafruit projects right from Firefox

#66

Post by nl »

usrnm wrote: post #58
nl wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No that's a mischaracterization. I'm saying I think it is important for free and open systems to be competitive with closed ecosystems, and to take advantage of the power of local systems. I believe in a world where we - as developers - can build systems that have both maximum safety and maximum utility for users. Currently there are two ways of distributing software that takes full advantage of the hardware users ha…

The web is not a software distribution platform, it's a platform for distributing thin clients to propriatory walled gardens that will break your use cases or just ban you at will. Users have absolutely no control over the web, so no I don't see it as a superior alternative

I completely disagree.

I've been using the web since 1994, and it's always distributed applications. I mean what were WAIS and Veronica except attempts to build applications - and they were (vastly inferior) predecessors to the web.

The web is the most ugly, horrible, messy, fantastic and beautiful Commons in human history and I love it.

Yes, people will block it and Balkenize it and make it ugly and make terrible apps that run horribly.

But it is better than anything else we've built, so there is that.

Re: Build Adafruit projects right from Firefox

#67

Post by cxr »

nl wrote: post #51
cxr wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Right, it's so much less onerous to have people download and set up an entirely separate fickle toolchain—and needing to trust that the install triggers in the package.json of some transitive dependency won't exfiltrate your personal data or inst…

You seem very angry and I clearly don't understand what you are talking about. > And you're not really responding to the substance of the comment anyway, which is that JS programmers—frequently writing for browser runtimes, even—are demanding that you install NodeJS, Bun, or Deno (because they hardcode the build scripts against those runtimes' APIs). Do you mean things like the Typescript + Webpack/whatever toolchain…

[flagged]

Re: Build Adafruit projects right from Firefox

#68

Post by Fnoord »

nl wrote: post #66
usrnm wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The web is not a software distribution platform, it's a platform for distributing thin clients to propriatory walled gardens that will break your use cases or just ban you at will. Users have absolutely no control over the web, so no I don't see it as a superior alternative

I completely disagree. I've been using the web since 1994, and it's always distributed applications. I mean what were WAIS and Veronica except attempts to build applications - and they were (vastly inferior) predecessors to the web. The web is the most ugly, horrible, messy, fantastic and beautiful Commons in human history and I love it. Yes, people will block it and Balkenize it and make it ugly and make terrible ap…

I think you're both right. What I dislike about it, is how we went from walled gardens to ads, tracking, and guilt tripping adblock users (while IMO whatever you see or don't want to see is up to the client). It is a huge cat and mouse game.

(That guilt tripping is what worries me in relation to WebUSB and webserial.)

In a TUI, it is still completely unacceptable that the client would spam the user with ads. And if it would, due to FOSS nature it is easy to circumvent.

If web devs are clever they produce an API instead of pure HTML + JS + the whole bloated crap around them. It'd save them costs, and heavy API users could subscribe.

Re: Build Adafruit projects right from Firefox

#69

Post by gregstoll »

aetherspawn wrote: post #54
gregstoll wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(I submitted a PR for caniuse a few days ago :-) https://github.com/Fyrd/caniuse/pull/7523 )

Is Web USB also supported?

Nope, our standards position on that is still negative, for one thing.
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