I would say the same thing for using a webcam in the browser or accessing the filesystem. But yet everyone use it today and a world without it is unimaginable.
Wrapping functionality with the right security is key, but I browsers in general is already doing a good job in that regard IMO.
Yes, but I really don't see the usecase for letting something potentially remote and untrusted to a serial device. How many people do actually need that? (Limited) filesystem access for web applications is also kind of dubious, outside of the trusty upload form.
Not to belittle your project, I'm all for hackers hacking on interesting projects, but I really am confused why such an API exists within the browser. The MDN page talks about browser connected 3D printers and boards like the ESP32, but boggles my mind that time and energy was expended to enable this.
One of the big benefits of web apps, is that they are truly portable. I can run my app on any machine with a relatively up-to-date web browser. Like it or not, this is leading to more and more serious work being done in the browser. Aren't APIs like this almost inevitable?
I really, honestly hope that this by some miracle will not happen. The "modern web" is the most bloated, slow and inefficient mess imaginable. Not knocking the browsers themselves, those are marvels of engineering, but yeah.
No longer (it now also runs Android* and certain Linux applications), but at the time Google proposed Web(MIDI/USB/Bluetooth) ChromeOS was only a browser-based operating system.
* Works on their x86 models, but depending on the specific application it's slower due to translation. Android apps runs best on ARM models.
The value proposition of this is pretty great, actually, and the implementation of it can be rather simple even though the actual interfaces underneath are rather fucked up historically because at it's core it's merely just getting a stream of bytes in/out.
