Yeah, Chromium’s implementation is IMO very elegant and genuinely improves security for most people. That’s why I’m a little miffed by comments that paint it as an obviously terrible feature, just like happens with the “read/write to a specific local folder” API.

These days, new browser features often aren’t in the users best interest, I understand and share the commonly discussed concerns on those. But compared to the alternatives, these specific APIs genuinely improve safety for most users AND make things more accessible for newbies and pros alike. Blocking them on principle (& without specific technical concerns) will not protect users when their remaining option gives malicious actors far more access without any exploits!

I do understand your concerns regarding safety, but not having WebUSB does not guarantee that malicious websites can’t access your USB devices. Both Firefox and Chromium already interact with your USB devices to provide features like debugging over USB, so malicious websites that exploit browser bugs are able to talk to your devices either way. And if we don’t count browser bugs, you can simply set your browser to block WebUSB by default to arrive at the same outcome.

Of course there is a chance that specific exploits could work in one case and not the other, but that’s something the real-life statistics haven’t shown to be an issue so far. Browsers are generally pretty safe these days due to multiple layers of sandboxing, so I’d be surprised to see major WebUSB-specific security exploits appearing in the future.

Edited to add:

Sorry, when I said “sky is falling” I meant a general erosion of user security and privacy, when using our “own” devices.

Same here, I hate the direction things are already clearly heading towards on mobile, and I expect desktops to get enshittified as well soon enough. But I see WebUSB as a major positive in that context (since it allows users to take control of their devices in a much easier and safer manner, & mostly guarantees backwards compatibility of such tools for many years to come). And although I’ve read comments similar to yours many times - this topic gets brought up fairly often - nobody has explained concrete technical issues that are likely to bite us.

I’m afraid of the sky falling (it is).

Somehow, I must’ve missed all these cases where bad actors abused the WebUSB API. So what did they do? What’s the worst damage the victims have suffered?

That’s general - in this specific case, by my reckoning, it can never be safe for a website to understand, in any depth, the hardware of the machine requesting it.

You still haven’t explained: why? When the options are “website” or “untrusted binary”, the website is objectively much safer. Sure, you can sandbox untrusted binaries - but then you can just sandbox the browser.

Yes, there are security concerns, but these fears haven’t been confirmed in real life, and they don’t disappear if we ban WebUSB! Instead, people have to run untrusted code with access to far more hardware than WebUSB allows.

Even better is a single downloadable HTML file. Downloadable programs will likely degrade over time, web APIs are highly stable and portable.

I still wish there was a “pledge” API to allow websites to disable functionality they don’t need. For example, this could be a perfect self-contained app that never needs any outside connections.

Honestly, this is such a shortsighted take. Awesome, instead of a simple “Allow?” dialogue to give the sandboxed website access to one specific USB device through an (over time) more and more well-tested implementation, we have to download untrusted binaries that by default get full access to large amounts of user data.

What are you so afraid of? It’s already been live in Chromium browsers for a while, and the sky hasn’t fallen. And I’m convinced it has largely improved security for users who flash Arduino-like devices, smart home stuff, some phones and a bunch of keyboard/mouse stuff.

I used to fairly frequently hit dead ends on Linux, e.g. regarding Wifi drivers or getting some (Linux) applications running. But the driver situation has improved greatly, and thanks to Flatpak, Distrobox & co. I’ve only ever run into one application I couldn’t install - a corporate antivirus. Whoopsie!

No, the logic was that replacing a GPL project with an MIT project is bad.

Godot didn’t replace an existing broadly used GPL game engine, so this is irrelevant.

The Wayland story for such tools was pretty bad for a while, but AFAIK the necessary protocols are now in place, so it should be possible to build this now (though probably not with all features due to security).

But I’d love something like AHK with a saner scripting language, maybe Lua or JS (through QuickJS)!

Have you heard the good news of our Lord and Savior, atomic Fedora versions? It’s even easier there because the driver is part of the image itself, and rollbacks are as easy as selecting a different entry in the boot manager.

Yes! You can wirelessly connect it to a PC and use it like the Index.

Why don’t you send me even more replies over the next few days, I’m sure that will be really helpful!

Sure, that was cleared up a couple hours ago when OP clarified as such. Since texture apparently wanted to argue (given his many comments posted long after the clarification), I thought I’d play along for him.

Yep, I’m being serious, Fedora’s decisions don’t affect Arch.

And yet, Fedora changing their default login manager won’t affect Arch.

Quickly in Bazzite, not at all in Cachy since that’s based on Arch.

Persona 5 is great and already mixes up the formula in many ways (gun). But many players just don’t care for RPGs regardless.

I think Expedition 33 showed that this is not the case. Guns are a minor change to combat in Persona 5, it felt almost the same as P3R. They should play around with bigger changes.

It’s Gnome. They do actually keep removing stuff that they disable by default, because they don’t even offer a GUI to configure these settings.

Ah, bummer. Looks like they don’t provide a Fedora repo, otherwise it would have been easy to layer onto Silverblue etc. There’s probably still some way, but I get not wanting to go through that trouble.

Out of interest, which client is that?