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Comment by nathan_phoenix | Hacker News Reader

Expected a huge list and there's only 3 items there, and one of them, JPEG XL, is kinda moot because it didn't seem viable until recently after Safari started supporting it...

Feel that the list could have had much more substance with the addition of webUSB, webSerial and such features which Chrome just strong armed.

In the current form the list and toot don't really drive the point home...

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I mean it was always viable. Chrome did an opt-in experiment that no one heard of and than used it as a justification for ceasing its development. As a format it is just a win-win situation. Most of the companies that deals with images spoke for JXL. I think Google tried to push its own format in favour of JXL. So I really don't think it is moot.

JPEGXL was (co)authored by Googlers so it's also their "own" format.

Google is big enough to have its own bureaucracy & infighting for this to easily & plausibly happen.

I think AVIF format had a play in this whole ordeal.

It’s a shame too because it takes a lot more resources to encode & can often give results that are too smooth. JPEG XL offers a lot of features from years of other formats like FLIF that never quite made it over the hump. You know you’re making deafened decisions when Facebook+Adobe were on the same side as GIMP+Krita in pleading to get the format back.

WebUSB is pretty useful though, I know people who've used it to control all sorts of devices in an easily accessible way.

Google themselves use it for updating Android devices, via making an ADB connection from their update webpage.

I don't see how it could be classified as hostile, as it's adding a feature rather than taking features away.

I’ve seen keyboards that allow firmware upgrades & configuration over WebUSB. This covers not just Linux but even smaller OSs as well as the audience using Android tablets as a PC or whatever.

WebMIDI is also a boon for anybody working with external audio gear on Linux, some companies like Novation went all in and provide web-based firmware updaters and configuration tools. For other gear I still need to boot up a Windows VM and fiddle with USB forwarding.

The permission prompt in Firefox is definitely sensible though (especially for SysEx), not sure if Chrome added that as well.

Very cool, let's train users to give websites root access to their devices.

yeah it's an easy way to update firmware on microcontrollers

Yeah, I wouldn’t be surprised if JXL gets implemented in Chrome after Safari and Firefox implementations are stabilized.

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