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Comment by edent | Hacker News Reader

I'm old enough to remember people grumbling when audio and video elements were added. Useless crap in a browser! Just compile your own MP3 player if you want to listen to music on a website!

Same as WebUSB - heaven forbid that a website can become more useful by flashing firmware to a device!!

The web is a platform. It will grow and mature into something we can't possibly imagine. It's OK for browsers to try new things to see what sticks.

I assume that Mozilla have done some research showing people like typing emoji but don't know how to use their system emoji picker. Even in an ultra-purist world where a browser does nothing other than render HTML (death to JS!!!) surely people will want to type into boxen and POST text somewhere?

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Even before that, there were folk moaning that "Mosaic has ruined the web with its pesky IMG tag - images should be opened in a user-specified viewer app rather than inline!".

Similarly, there were people who complained about forms and buttons at roughly the same time and, a few years later, img maps, frames, layers (okay, with good reason), and CSS.

They (or their spiritual heirs) always pop up on Firefox threads, for some reason. For those people, I want to point out that Lynx is right here and is as usable as it's ever been: https://github.com/ThomasDickey/lynx-snapshots

> Same as WebUSB - heaven forbid that a website can become more useful by flashing firmware to a device!!

Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize.[1]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> Same as WebUSB - heaven forbid that a website can become more useful by flashing firmware to a device!!

Useful for whom ? The CIA ?

I used it for both GrapheneOS (it flashed a new OS to my Android phone) and for updating the firmware for a niche LoRaWAN electronics board.

The alternative would have been booting to Windows, downloading some dodgy .exe from an advert infested site, and running untrusted code which inexplicably required my admin password.

I'm pleased the Web is able to put a stop to nonsense like that.

People with devices to flash firmware to? Which basically is a lot of things, from musicians to physicians, and a lot in-between.

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