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Comment by fransje26 | Hacker News Reader

The irony of advertising a privacy-enabled de-googled system, and then telling me that my Firefox browser is not support, and that I should use Edge, Opera or Chrome instead....

Browsing:

https://e.foundation/installer/

Reply:

https://imgur.com/a/al1Q9DM

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This is related to Firefox unwilling to add support for WebUSB because, I suppose, they believe that a browser is not a general purpose application launcher and the scope of what it can do should be limited. As such, it should not be allowed to e.g. control peripherals like the USB devices.

Which is in my opinion a fairly reasonable take.

But given the current situation, I would assume that the companies providing WebUSB tools like installers would also spend a few moments to create e.g. a Python script that would do the same thing but locally. So that anyone unwilling to use WebUSB within their browser can have a vetted and transparent way to get the same thing done.

> Firefox unwilling to add support for WebUSB because, I suppose, they believe that a browser is not a general purpose application launcher

No, it's security concern.

https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/issues/100

WebUSB Indeed sounds like madness

I am opposed to it for similar reasons as in GP, but it does let you do cool things like installing Android ROMs without touching adb by having a (presumably) WASM-based impl of adb.

And, to counter the arguments that "the site tells you that you need WebUSB support": you get to the https://e.foundation/installer/ when you click "Check device compatibility" on the main page. Personally, I'd expect either a check that works in any browser or a simple compatible device list. Why would I need a special browser just to check if I can use this OS?

This is especially strange considering they have the list of supported devices in their docs https://doc.e.foundation/devices

So I think the issue is that the button on the main page is poorly named

What I currently see:

main page -> download and try! -> browse supported devices

lands on https://doc.e.foundation/devices which is a list of models, while

main page -> download and try! -> check device compatibility

lands on https://e.foundation/installer/ the chromium-only webusb page. It could be a better page; instead of showing a scary "navigator not suppored" modal demanding you install a particular browser, it could say the automated compatibility tester requires one of these browsers and your phone plugged in with USB, otherwise here's the device finder page

Hmmm, It seems to require the WebUSB API: https://caniuse.com/?search=webusb

If the site can detect that it can't use WebUSB, it can give you instructions on how to download and flash the mobile OS, not tell you to fuck off.

Compare: https://wiki.lineageos.org/devices/tokay/

That's not an installer, that's a device page.

It's the specific functionality needed here that Firefox lacks that makes the /e/ page show the warning, unlike the lineage page that does not have the problem in the first place.

The fun part is that I got to this installer page by clicking on "Check device compatibility" on the https://e.foundation/e-os/ page..

So I was actually expecting a device page, not a WebUSB program..

Okay, that makes your complaint very understandable.

Absolutely. This is handled very badly, and I was also surprised about the bad UX on that screen.

Same here, they advertise with the duckduckgo browser app on the above page, but it's not supported checking compatibility.

same for grapheneos. only difference maybe that you can choose to also manually install it without WebUSB

e/OS is not degoogled, only some of the functionality has been rewritten in microG (eg not implementing security checks but instead spoofing them), but still uses Google play sdk and libraries.

Additionally it runs in the privileged mode, so any exploit on that, well, means back luck.

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