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Comment by steelbrain | Hacker News Reader

Chrome is doing amazing work with these WebAPIs. Here's a quick list of things enabled by Chrome being open-minded and allowing WebHID and WebUSB APIs to exist:

- Turn your Stadia controllers into bluetooth controllers: https://stadia.google.com/controller/index_en_GB.html

- Android Flash Tool: https://flash.android.com/welcome

- fastboot.js - FastBoot API but entirely though the web: https://kdrag0n.github.io/fastboot.js/demo/

- WebADB - Android debugging interface through the web: https://app.webadb.com/

and here's my favorite (because I used it in my RX-8)

- Node-Carplay - Carplay interface through a USB dongle in your browser with no external dependencies!!1! (https://github.com/rhysmorgan134/node-CarPlay)

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Add to that list QMK VIA, which allows reprogramming a keyboard running the QMK firmware from the browser!

https://www.caniusevia.com/

Reprogram a $30 ham radio:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39850972

Are these really the job of your browser?

The browser is a great for distribution (apps are just URLs) and security (web pages need to ask permission before accessing anything on your computer outside of their domain).

More people should question the common belief that desktop OSes (without enforced app sandboxing) do a proper job at being a platform for utilities like OP's. When you download and run an .exe on a normal Windows pc, you're giving it read and write access to everything on your user account. It's bad that you're required to put so much trust in developers to run programs on typical desktop systems; this either ends up causing people to be extremely picky about what they run or to give out trust too freely and get bitten by malware often. Platforms like the browser which sandbox (web) apps and enforce a granular permission system are terrific.

With all the APIs available to the browser at what point do I have the same worry that an .exe brings?

Web pages can't do anything that affects the rest of your system without going through a permission dialog, and the permissions are always very granular. A page can't trigger a yes/no permission dialog to get access to all of your files; it can only trigger a file-picker that gives it access to whatever the user picks in it. An .exe doesn't need to go through any permission dialog to upload/wipe/infect any file in your home directory.

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