[flagged]
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39980210.
Aside from that, in this case its pretty obvious you're letting yourself be used as a suppression vehicle by FOSS crazies ramming the flag button. Would have been nice to see a more neutral action being taken instead of choosing a side.
That also segues into something I’ve mentioned before: moderation needs to be consistent. Randomly picking when to pull the trigger and when not is a bunch of crap.
Everything is related to everything somehow. You can't start dumb flamewars on HN and it's especially bad form to start them in people's Show HN, that's all.
As such I agree that Firefox refusing to implement things like WebSerial and WebHID is shooting themselves in the foot, and will only drive more users towards Blink.
You could have made your point in a less inflammatory way, though.
https://mozilla.github.io/standards-positions/#webserial
Allowing serial but not HID would be really strange. With HID you get standard identifiers that let you filter out devices that are too dangerous for the web. With serial you get nothing. Even if you know a device is dangerous, there's no way to protect users from it.
Google presented a "spec" that wasn't even a spec. They were asked to create a better spec. Instead they just shipped WebHID, and several months later dumped several hundred pages of specifications saying "there".
Whatever your position on hardware standards are, this is not how standards are presented.
Edit: the status of WebHID is literally "not a W3C Standard nor is it on the W3C Standards Track." and it's current state is barely above "scratched on a napkin". But Google couldn't care less
There's tons of work done with this group, and it is very much a genuine, multi-party attempt to standardize out specs.
I have a hard time believing this is an innocent mistake you've made, portraying such a stark "Google couldn't care less" dark-world fantasy. Over something very normal very boring and very commonly done by everyone in the web community. Yes, the web is bigger than w3c today. It has been for a long long long time now. HTML5 isnt w3c either, but no one is saying the sky is falling because of that.
This is literally the timeline: https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/issues/459
As Google said in the comments there, they already knew there was strong opposition in principle to this spec, and that they wouldnt get cooperation advancing it, and hence didn't spend as much time doing spec work as they normally would have.
Chrome themselves seem very apologetic about it & to my knowledge this has not happened again.
The other huge missing piece of the picture here is that Chrome didn't write this spec de novo. A huge huge huge amount of the work in writing webhid is re exposing existing USB hid standards & data structures. There should still be a good web spec & this was a failure, but the team was wrapping something that's already very well defined & that they didn't have a ton of leeway to shape and change.
So no one was going to provide meaningful feedback (just, we won't work on this feedback), and the spec was already 3/4 set in stone before work started converting it to a web spec.
It's still a dark-world fantasy to me. And it's deceitful, brazenly incorrect, & full of slanted malice to say chrome isn't or even wasn't interested in standardizations. It's super dodgy quoting the spec saying this ain't a w3c spec as proof that the team doesn't care. That is, you citing, "not a W3C Standard nor is it on the W3C Standards Track." That's a epic & wild distortion, taking advantage of people's ignorance to make Chrome look bad when in fact using groups like https://wicg.io is how tons of amazing great work happens, is a place where all browsers have been bringing new work for a while. You'd have to say Safari and Mozilla don't care about the web too if you want to dump on Chrome here for using wicg to standardize.
Mozilla has done it many times in the past when they tried to only support open-source codecs or refused to implement the DRM black box. In practice, at the time that meant on Firefox you used Adobe Flash for any video playback, and Chrome had a native `<video>` implementation. Even now, due to DRM differences, Netflix maxes out at 720p in Firefox, but 1080p in Chrome, and 4K in Edge.
Time and again their concerns have been shown to be true.
Did you just miss entire premise of the article, how WebHID made the lives of a bunch of working people much better? Would you rather make these people have a much more difficult time now so Firefox diehard can have a “proper” WebHID in 5 years..?
It doesn't mean it's a good idea.
Now Firefox cannot even implement the "proper HID" because Google has already shipped their version
However, if you believe that the choice is binary, how's this for a measure: world's largest advertising and tracking company with the world's most dominant browser should not be able to just shove whatever it wants into the browser with full disregard for any and all concerns.