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Comment by SV_BubbleTime | Hacker News Reader

> Even though shunned by Apple and Mozilla, Web Bluetooth enjoys wide support and just works.

That’s an interesting way to say Chrome Only feature but you shouldn’t care because Mozilla ran Firefox into 3%/ground and Safari doesn’t matter.

IDK… to the point of the project… I guess that’s cool. But once you have defined and tested your GATTs, it hasn’t been my experience to come back to it a ton of times.

I just wrote unit and systems tests along with a BLE speedtest that also confirms protocol so I could run it where it matters - on different phones.

It was my experience to care more about distance, speed, interval, and MTU on actual hardware than protocol confirmation to a PC.

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> But once you have defined and tested your GATTs, it hasn’t been my experience to come back to it a ton of times.

> It was my experience to care more about distance, speed, interval, and MTU on actual hardware than protocol confirmation to a PC.

That's exactly my concern, coupled with a (perceived) small pool of Bluetooth developers. Do you think there's a market for a Postman style commercial cloud product for team collaboration?

What justification is there for not implementing this across all browsers?

because there's still a huge argument about what features from the host system that the web browser should be able to deal with. Lots of people think that webusb, webserial, webbluetooth and similiar things are a security and/or privacy nightmare.

And while some argue that it's enough to put these features behind permission dialogs, browsers already have enough of those that many users will blaze through and approve anything that pops up in order to silence the noisy browser and make the page work as expected, which naturally has major implications.

That's not to say that WebUSB, WebBluetooth, etc shouldn't exist, but clearly putting everything behind dialogs doesn't scale and something better needs to be figured out.

Security.

A lot of hardware devices pretty much implicitly trust the device on the other side of the data connection, because historically anyone able to run software on a machine also has physical access to the device. This resulted in devices accepting firmware updates over Bluetooth, for example, because how else would you update the firmware?

And now with protocols like Web Bluetooth, the only thing standing between between the average user and a random website completely owning their physical hardware devices is a single "I agree" permission popup.

"B...b...b.but the bad guys might use it."

We would never have had PCs with the attitude seen in this thread.

The browser does not need to be an OS.

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