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Comment by kristopolous | Hacker News Reader

Hey, sorry, I'm really dumb here. How would one use this?

It appears as though you click on each button and see what color the button turns. If the button turns red the site doesn’t have the permission to do what the button says. If the button turns green then the site can do what the button says.

I think his question is: what's the point?

Mostly as a tool for developers to test various permissions on various browsers

I guess this rabbit hole continues if one asks what the point of such testing could be. One thing I'd find useful is that I could take screenshots (or live demo this site) if I was doing some non-web-development thing such as doing a presentation and wanted to explain WebAuthn flow or something.

Because if I was a developer doing development, I'd test browsers with what I developed.

Or maybe you are a developer of that is using one of the features for the first time. Now you can check out the permission flow without having written any code. Similar to live examples in MDN.

I found it interesting to see what happens on safari on iOS after each permission was requested. About 1/3 did nothing, a few of them were denied without a prompt, a few of them were as expected. And a few of them had weird prompts like the pan/tilt on asking for camera permission.

Was also interesting to see webauthn ask if I wanted to allow a site to use faceid which I didn’t know was even possible

Yeah WebAuthn is really neat! Unfortunately many sites still don't think iOS supports it so I have to use my auth app instead of my YubiKey on those sites when on my phone.

Thank you. This explanation was helpful to me.

It's a handy way for developers to compare the web permissions that different browsers support, and to be able to quickly see what the permission UI looks like.

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