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Comment by ur-whale | Hacker News Reader

Is that not a Chrome-only thing?

Why would anyone want to do this if it only works on one browser?

Because that browser provides a universal API that works across pretty much all the popular operating systems, whereas the alternative is to build and maintain code for each of those systems separately.

That browser is Google controlled spyware, and even temporarily installing it on my box to talk to a USB device gives me the willies.

There's of course Chromium, but the code base of Chrome is so huge, I'm not even sure Chromium has been properly audited to be "clean" wrt being subservient to Mountain View.

I do understand the old dream of a "universal API", it's snake oil that has been peddled to the IT crowd since I was a teenager (looong time ago).

I also wish it could happen, but Chrome certainly isn't it.

Shipping cross platform code that talks to USB devices is a nightmare. Libusb has made leaps and bounds to improve it vs. the myriad of native platform APIs, but you still will have to painfully walk users through a process that's often fraught with OS-specific confusion and issues.

> Libusb has made leaps and bounds to improve it vs. the myriad of native platform APIs

As a matter of fact, that is exactly what Chrome uses under the hood.

Except that instead of exposing the libusb API as unchanged as possible at the JS layer, they've somehow decided - they being Google and hence smarter than everyone - to re-engineer to API to be o-so-slightly different, but not actually any better.

What a crock.

> Why would anyone want to do this if it only works on one browser?

Chrome is at least as dominant as IE 5 & 6 were. The only reason that you're not hearing constant screaming about the near-monopoly (indeed, most of the screaming is abusing Apple for not just "doing what Google says" in the browser space) is because for some reason people think that the monopoly is good when an advertising company is doing it.

Sorry, 63% of browser usage is dominant, but not a monopoly by any means. The web is just as accessable on other browsers.

95% on Desktop being Chrome, CEF, or forks of Chrome is quite a bit higher than your number.

Only on mobile is it less, and only because of iOS Safari

So? The web works just as well on other browsers. I swear this community would have tried to break up The Beatles because they had a "monopoly on music". Chrome is not a monopoly, it's just popular.

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