[HN Gopher] Things you can do with a browser in 2020
___________________________________________________________________
Things you can do with a browser in 2020
Author : therealmarv
Score : 219 points
Date : 2020-03-19 18:20 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| raygull wrote:
| I had no idea the Web Coffee API was so mature.
| drivingmenuts wrote:
| Why is this even an API?
|
| Seems like a joke API rather than something actually useful.
| xrd wrote:
| Seems like this snowballed:
|
| https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Status/418
|
| "418 I'm a teapot"
| anchpop wrote:
| Go click the link in the github repo, it's actually very cool
| dalore wrote:
| Never going to covfefe you up
| pjmorris wrote:
| Subtle.
| worble wrote:
| I'm slightly disappointed that clicking on it didn't just
| return a HTTP 418 error, but was nontheless satisfied with the
| result.
| ASalazarMX wrote:
| > Use covfefe protocol to start coffee machines.
|
| I should have known, but I wasn't paying attention.
| russellbeattie wrote:
| I thought I knew of all the APIs, but that one surprised me.
| Hadn't realized how well done it was...
| gman83 wrote:
| If you'd have told me in 2010 that this would be the state of the
| art of the web in 2020, I'd have been sorely disappointed...
| holtalanm wrote:
| personal opinion -- almost all of these features are really
| cool to me as a user and a developer.
|
| just shows, everyone's got an opinion.
| oliv__ wrote:
| Why should a browser be allowed to check for device battery life?
| That seems wayyy off limits
| k__ wrote:
| They can reduce something that is good but not when your
| battery is low.
| z5h wrote:
| Surprised to find out covfefe is an actual protocol.
| ehsankia wrote:
| The documentation goes in much more detail.
| rkagerer wrote:
| As a user, so many of these I wish did NOT exist. E.g: Push
| Notifications, Banners, Web Share, Contacts, Page Visibility,
| Badging.
|
| Uncertain about USB, Bluetooth, Locks, Keyboard Lock, and Native
| File System.
|
| I don't _want_ my browser doing those things.
| lbebber wrote:
| I like that push notifications on the browser exist (for e.g.
| Slack, WhatsApp), I just wish there were no popups for it--just
| an unintrusive button you could press to enable it.
| TheRealPomax wrote:
| Then turn them off. All these things landed because users _do_
| use them. I 100% want web share, page visibility, usb, and
| native file system, for instance, because the browser has
| become a convenient _replacement_ for a bunch of playgroup
| /PoC/testbed applications that I might have used 10 years ago.
| asjw wrote:
| There are people who want to be spied by social networks to
| have a pair of free shoes and post pictures of them online
|
| It doesn't mean it's the right thing to do for society
|
| Browsers have gone far beyond their purpose in an inorganic
| way
|
| It's like if my alarm suddenly started making coffee, toasts,
| working as remote and the new planned feature was the ability
| to warm itself up and iron my shirts
|
| And it would still be a fraction of what browsers do today
| ehsankia wrote:
| To clarify, most of these work by asking for permission
| first, and you can set them to "always deny" in the browser
| settings: chrome://settings/content
|
| There are similar site content settings in any major browser.
| masswerk wrote:
| While agree that most of these are highly invasive and
| certainly not a requirement, the Visibility API is actually a
| good thing. Apps which are running continuous scripts, like
| games, etc, may and should detect, when they are hidden (i.e.
| the tab they are in isn't the front most one) and pause. This
| is explicitely meant to preserve resources on the client
| machine and to benefit the user. On the other hand, there isn't
| much to gain from on the app's side, beyond receiving a
| notification to wake up and to possibly check for any updates
| that happened in the meantime to be applied.
| megablast wrote:
| I don't agree, I leave a video on, switch tabs to read
| something else, and now it stops. There is no way to get it
| to keep playing and switch tabs.
| duxup wrote:
| For rando browsing on the web, yeah they aren't great.
|
| On the other hand for say a corporate web application where my
| only users really do want them ... they're AWESOME.
| swiley wrote:
| At least with the push notifications I can get notified about
| _my_ stuff.
|
| On the iPhone they require paying apple $100 a year which
| almost ensures most will be ads.
| ehsankia wrote:
| Could you use an existing solution such as pushover [0]?
|
| [0] https://pushover.net/
| Nextgrid wrote:
| Do you mean the proprietary Apple push notifications in
| Safari? In this case I've only seen it ever once (as opposed
| to seeing the "normal" notifications on pretty much every
| shitty blogspam website) so it seems like the 100$ acts like
| a good filter against BS notifications.
| ipsum2 wrote:
| Consider that different users have different needs, and almost
| all features listed are opt-in.
| MaxBarraclough wrote:
| Even if it's opt-in, we still pay a price. Complexity has its
| costs.
|
| It means my browser is more bigger and more complex. It
| broadens the attack surface exposed by my browser, perhaps
| even if I don't opt-in. It dilutes the efforts of the Firefox
| team. It introduces new ways for browsers to be subtly
| incompatible. It further raises the barrier to someone making
| a serious browser from scratch.
|
| Also, are we guaranteed that these features will be opt-in?
| There were serious security issues with WebGL (predictably),
| and I don't think WebGL was opt-in.
| rolltiide wrote:
| except you have to opt out of them all before you can consume
| that 1 website's content
|
| hm I wonder if there is a chrome extension for that
| dstaley wrote:
| > except you have to opt out of them all before you can
| consume that 1 website's content
|
| This is an issue with that particular website's
| implementation, not something inherent to the browser or
| the API.
| salawat wrote:
| >This is an issue with that particular website's
| implementation, not something inherent to the browser or
| the API.
|
| When that statement applies to 90% of pages out there,
| that argument gets more stale than cracker left out for
| the better part of a year.
|
| That staleness, in fact, is why no one is encouraged to
| run blind unauthenticated proxies on the Internet
| anymore. Completely valid technology. Very problematic
| use case.
| rolltiide wrote:
| > This is an issue with that particular website's
| implementation
|
| because the product manager thought my user session was
| engaging with the site for 2 seconds longer so it must be
| good.
|
| I never said it was the browser or the API just
| acknowledging that it is a predictable _gripe_ and not a
| feature, and yes _enabled_ by the browser and APIs
| markovbot wrote:
| How about the upcoming "SMS Receiver API" and "Contacts API"?
| Those look absolutely terrifying, and as soon as Chrome
| implements it, every shitty ass newspaper that is currently
| refusing to display their articles in private browsing windows
| will refuse to display their articles unless you fork over your
| contact list.
| untog wrote:
| Have you actually read anything about either of those APIs or
| are you just reacting to the names?
|
| The Contacts API does not allow unrestricted access to your
| Contacts. It presents a _picker_ for you to choose _a_
| contact.
|
| The SMS Receiver API is not universal access to SMS messages,
| it is access to _one specific message_ and only one that
| contains your domain name in the message text.
|
| Both have very obvious utility to users. They don't look even
| vaguely terrifying.
| melbourne_mat wrote:
| I think having those capabilities is fine but I hate the
| endless notifications to use them from every damn web site!
| There should be a second and much more subtle notification
| system which does not obscure content or attract attention.
| ryukafalz wrote:
| I have mixed feelings on this. On one hand, websites that
| should be just documents are turning into resource-intensive
| applications, which is frustrating. Generally I do not want
| most websites using these features.
|
| On the other hand, the web as a runtime is one of the most
| universal platforms we have. If I run Slack in a browser, I
| sure do want it to be able to notify me! (Though I wish doing
| so felt more like the Electron app - I'd rather use my browser
| than Electron if the UX were similar enough. I already have a
| browser, I don't need another per application!)
|
| And as an occasional user of less popular mobile platforms
| (Ubuntu Touch, etc) a more featureful web runtime helps close
| the gap between those platforms and Android/iOS.
|
| I do think it'd be better if these two use cases were more
| explicitly distinct than they are now, though.
| Arcsech wrote:
| It's almost like we shouldn't have tortured a document
| transfer system until it was able to run full-on
| applications.
| ironmagma wrote:
| It's just the amorphousness of life seeping in. People want
| more things in more contexts, which will always expand
| scope of the things they use.
| dasil003 wrote:
| I think there are strong Gall's-Law, worse-is-better and
| business reasons why a proper GUI platform could never have
| crossed the chasm to universally cross-platform, on-demand
| delivery, with no single vendor owning it.
| modeless wrote:
| If operating systems had ever provided security strong
| enough to run untrusted code, we wouldn't have needed to.
| It's really a failing of operating system security. Even
| today no operating system provides an application sandbox
| as strong and versatile as the browser.
|
| Platforms have fallen back on walled gardens (app stores)
| with centralized control of all code execution to
| compensate for the deficiencies of their security models. I
| don't want a future where the only apps I can run have to
| be signed and approved by Apple ahead of time. The web is
| the escape hatch.
| ironmagma wrote:
| But people still download and run apps every day. Some
| even prefer it. I doubt that the cause of this migration
| was due to security concerns -- since when are app
| developers particularly concerned about the quality of
| the security controls imposed on them? I suspect the
| shift was more due to ease of access, both by the user
| and for the developer, helped along by easier
| compatibility.
| TheCoelacanth wrote:
| App developers care about the barrier to getting users to
| use their app. The barrier to getting a user to click on
| a weblink is much, much lower than the barrier to getting
| them to install an app.
| millstone wrote:
| This is one of the largest failings of the App Store
| providers. They should recognize this installation
| barrier and work towards fast and ephemeral app installs.
| gowld wrote:
| _Users_ care about security (at least a lot). That 's why
| they don't install every random app that they could.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| The web was originally conceived as an interactive
| hypermedia platform, not a "document transfer system".
|
| It's true that it has displaced things they were true
| document or file transfer systems (Gopher, FTP) because it
| subsumes those functionalities, but it wasn't ever just
| that.
| AgentME wrote:
| Would it really be better if we didn't evolve the web, and
| we had more OS-specific unsandboxed applications and
| greater fragmentation between OSes (and a stronger
| incentive for everyone to stick to one OS, like Windows)
| instead?
| millstone wrote:
| Yes, OS-specific applications are good, and we should
| have more of them. By "sticking to one OS", and apps that
| follow the OS's conventions, users actually have a chance
| to develop expertise in those apps. But the web ensures
| that everyone stays an amateur.
|
| While website capabilities have evolved, the web UI
| itself has regressed. No major UI paradigms have emerged
| from the web since the 90s (except tabs, arguably). URLs,
| bookmarks, cmd-F Find, and clicking on links still
| dominate, except they work _worse_ now compared to the
| 90s, because of SPAs and lazy loading.
| AgentME wrote:
| My point is that if the web didn't evolve, then Windows
| would have further cemented its position. If people made
| Windows apps instead of websites, then other operating
| systems and mobile wouldn't have taken off as much
| because fewer people would make multiple apps than the
| number of people in our world who made cross-platform web
| apps.
|
| Also, all of those features that rkagerer complained
| about would be even more abusable, because in general,
| Windows apps don't have to ask for permissions to those
| things. I don't get how someone could complain that it's
| bad for a web app to be able to ask for permissions to
| their contacts, and would prefer to have a native app
| (that can get them silently by default).
|
| Maybe you could replace "Windows" with "iOS" in this
| hypothetical, which would improve the permissions side of
| things, but I think it's likely that Windows was only
| supplantable in the first place because of the popularity
| of things being on the cross-platform web instead of on
| native Windows apps, and especially as someone without an
| iOS device, I'd be pretty sour if the effort on the web
| went purely into a locked-down non-open platform I didn't
| have. I think the way the web has approached being a
| universal open-source/open-standard app platform is
| extremely exciting. The fact that web app buttons look
| different than iOS/etc buttons is a small price compared
| to the benefits, and is the sort of thing that can
| probably be solved within the model once developers think
| it's important enough to. (I think modern frameworks
| and/or the web components standard will provide a good
| base to get more native-like experiences common in the
| web.)
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| As opposed to a strong incentive to stick to Chrome?
| duxup wrote:
| The browser is such a great place as far as running an
| application goes almost universally.
|
| I remember when applications had to be tied to the OS, does
| it run on unix, linux, some other OS, or hardware... what a
| pain.
|
| If it is a web app it probabbly works most places.
| progval wrote:
| > I remember when applications had to be tied to the OS,
| does it run on unix, linux, some other OS, or hardware...
| what a pain.
|
| And now many are tied to one or two browsers.
| throwaway_pdp09 wrote:
| ISWYM but I'd be much, much happier if the browser
| functionality of mainly delivering text and images was
| kept separate from the application functionality of ...
| doing bloody everything.
|
| I want to turn off the application side of things for my
| safety (and I do), but too many sites require it
| unnecessarily to do the most basic tasks of displaying
| static text and pictures.
| progval wrote:
| I wish major browsers would show a banner asking to
| enable JS, like they did for Flash and Java. This would
| discourage developers from using JS unless they really
| need it, and they'll think about graceful degradation.
|
| But browsers won't, because they have nothing to gain
| from it.
| z3t4 wrote:
| It should be possible to turn off these features with a browser
| extension/plugin.
| untog wrote:
| Then you're out of step with what users want these days.
|
| Nothing wrong with that! But to take an example, when I hit a
| share button on a page I want to see the native share box, not
| some hideous iframed monstrosity that only works with Facebook.
| So I want Web Share. And I don't want to download an entire
| native app just so that I can receive a push alert when my food
| order is on the way, a web site works much better for that. So
| I'm happy that Web Push exists.
|
| I get the nostalgia for the "simpler days", but web browers are
| essentially a universal OS these days. As both a user and a
| developer I'm quite happy with this.
| asjw wrote:
| If they were OSes they would have a kernel and user land
|
| You would have ring0 and ring3
|
| You could decide what to install or what remove
|
| In the browser everything is exposed to everyone by default
|
| More than an OS is a disaster waiting to happen
| detaro wrote:
| > _In the browser everything is exposed to everyone by
| default_
|
| Several critical or potential annoying functions have opt-
| in prompts by default, unlike your typical desktop OS.
| asjw wrote:
| It makes no difference whatsoever
|
| An OS doesn't protect you from outside, it protects the
| system from apps and users
|
| Imagine if your OS asked you if you would like to
| allocate a block of memory at address X everytime it does
|
| That's what to a regular user the prompt means
|
| They just click 'Yes Forever' and are done with it
|
| But that's still an application settings, it has nothing
| to do with being an OS, browsers are mostly a system for
| distributing malware in the easiest of ways
|
| At the cost of being as complex as a full OS, without any
| of the benefits
|
| Wanna bet that if vendors started distributing naked
| browsers and the extra functionality (of course approved
| by W3C as standards) were bundled in plugins, which is
| entirely possible, half of those would linger there with
| zero downloads?
| gowld wrote:
| What's wrong with native app? You can delete it when you are
| done with it, just like you can close a browser tab when you
| are done with the "entire" web app you downloaded.
| jsjddbbwj wrote:
| Native apps can siphon out much more info off your mobile
| than websites can.
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| No uBlock, no dev console, no network tab. Completely
| opaque. An install step just to order a pizza.
| cosmotic wrote:
| Share API isn't needed for sharing content, copy and paste
| worked better than share api and it was around decades ago.
|
| About what percent of push notification requests do you
| accept? I think my percentage is 0, and the number of
| requests is high tens if not hundreds. I don't trust browser
| notifications at all.
|
| Here's some stats:
| https://www.businessofapps.com/marketplace/push-
| notification...
|
| Opt-in rates are around 65%, open rate is between 1 and 10%,
| I suspect some percentage of those opt-in rates were
| unintentional or coerced and some percentage of those opens
| were click bate or accident. so <2.5% of notifications were
| desired.
|
| I think it's safe to assume a significant portion of the opt-
| ins and notifications were desired-not.
|
| Based on this information, I would consider notifications
| undesirable.
| cj wrote:
| You consider them undesirable, but they are a critical
| feature for many applications.
|
| Specifically, chat. More specifically... support agents
| providing live chat support. (And for that matter, end
| users interacting via chat appreciate push notifications on
| reply)
|
| Without browser push notifications, there really isn't a
| good alternative.
|
| The fact that opt in rates are close to 50% is probably a
| good thing! It means that browsers aren't using dark
| patterns to trick people in to opting into things they
| don't want.
|
| I would 100% agree with you if opting out were difficult.
| But at least Chrome's implementation makes it very easy to
| decide which sites I want push notifications from, I really
| can't think of any downside given the easy opt out.
| brundolf wrote:
| Worth noting is that "prefers-color-scheme" works in _all_ major
| OSes at this point, mobile and desktop. If your site already has
| a dark theme, there is no reason at all not to be integrating it
| this way.
|
| Even if you don't have a dark theme already, it's a huge value-
| add..... (@dang?)
| stronglikedan wrote:
| It's funny to me that dark themes seem to be the preferred
| theme type in online discussions, because in practice, most
| people I know prefer a light theme on a monitor set to high
| contrast and relatively low brightness in a well lit setting. I
| too prefer that, as it seems to reduce (eliminate?) my
| eyestrain after hours on the computer.
| brundolf wrote:
| I think it depends a lot on age and level of eyesight. I've
| never once felt eye strain from looking at a dark theme, and
| if a room is even somewhat dark then a blindingly white
| screen gives me a headache. I can always fiddle with my
| brightness as needed for different situations, at least on my
| phone, but that's kind of a pain. On a desktop monitor it's
| usually a significantly bigger pain.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| I've always heard that you should use an off-white or off-
| black, and that CSS like #000 or #FFF for backgrounds is a
| no-no.
| ehsankia wrote:
| > on a monitor set to high contrast and relatively low
| brightness in a well lit setting
|
| That's 3 pretty big assumptions :)
|
| Sure, in that situation light mode is great, but if I'm
| browsing HN on my laptop at night in bed in the dark, I would
| definitely prefer dark mode.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| The problem with bright themes used like that is that "high"
| contrast is still not very high at all, unless you go for
| OLED technology - but then you'd want to use green-on-black
| anyway to minimize wear on the display elements.
| jonfw wrote:
| Or just use whatever colors you like and replace displays
| when necessary.
|
| I spend way too many hours using a monitor to let it's
| lifecycle determine what color-scheme I'll spend those
| hours looking at.
| unlinked_dll wrote:
| It's also completely broken when using GTK themes with Firefox
| installed with snap.
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| Fascinating, they're _still_ Win95 's ability to customize
| color schemes.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| I think you a word.
| gwern wrote:
| Yes, it's such an obscure feature that many of the people who
| enable it don't even realize it... Ever since I added dark mode
| to gwern.net, I've been getting or seeing complaints about how
| my website is broken or 'defaults to black-on-white' (it
| doesn't). :(
| brundolf wrote:
| Huh... It's weird to me that someone who has that enabled on
| their OS (even if they didn't realize it) would be upset
| about it on a website.
| 2038AD wrote:
| That's silly of them. The only problem I've noticed is that
| images are inverted when they shouldn't be (e.g. on hover or
| the enlarged view).
| worble wrote:
| I'm sure someone will call me a slowpoke on this, but one
| really cool thing that I didn't know about until recently was
| that you can also use this in images with srcset's, to display
| a darker image. For example, if you want to put the "Made with
| Bulma"[0] tag on your website, they offer a light and dark
| version, which you could use like this:
| <picture> <source srcset="made-with-bulma__dark.png"
| media="(prefers-color-scheme: dark)"> <img alt="Made
| with bulma" src="made-with-bulma" width="128" height="24">
| </picture>
|
| This will automatically replace with the image src when the
| srcset criteria is met, but keep all the other tags!
|
| [0]https://bulma.io/made-with-bulma/
| uk_programmer wrote:
| This is a great list some of these APIs look pretty interesting
| and didn't know about them this is a great list.
|
| Push notifications are becoming an irritation mainly because of
| their overuse. The number of sites where you go to them to have a
| look at one piece of information and you have to tell them no to
| push notifications is becoming quite an annoyance.
| duxup wrote:
| There's a lot of those APIs that are awesome for corporate web
| apps ... but brutal on the web.
| ocdtrekkie wrote:
| This was an example of where web developers really should've
| known better in advance. They literally coded an intentional
| new way for people to make popup ads, and it's the primary use
| of the web notifications API.
|
| I regularly hear of complaints about spammy popups on people's
| computers, even when they don't "have the web browser open".
| And it turns out it's just stock Google Chrome, doing exactly
| what Google Chrome was designed to do: Pop up ads, that
| everyone has since started shipping ads through.
| uk_programmer wrote:
| I believe Brave has them disabled by default or an option for
| it. It is a shame a good feature has been abused, but yes you
| are right it is to be expected.
| [deleted]
| init0 wrote:
| https://whatwebcando.today
| marczellm wrote:
| More like a "things Chrome can do in 2020".
| fenwick67 wrote:
| Who seriously thought the Battery Status API was a good idea?
| Someone thought this was useful enough to write a spec for it...
| iameli wrote:
| Fullscreen games providing a battery indicator is always nice.
| fenwick67 wrote:
| Seems legit, although that should probably be the OSes job to
| overlay that
| deadmutex wrote:
| That has its own set of challenges -- now you have to
| design your game so that the battery indicator doesn't
| cover up an important part of the game. Also, what if the
| OS allows it to be configurable location/size, etc.
| fenwick67 wrote:
| I was imagining a pop-up saying "your battery is getting
| low"
| CraneWorm wrote:
| > now you have to design your game so that the battery
| indicator doesn't cover up an important part of the game
|
| You should not be able to do that; It's a feature that
| you cannot do that.
| tmpz22 wrote:
| Emergency tools could benefit from knowing if the device was
| about to die or not, like the Tinder SOS app, government
| emergency tools, etc. Imagine sending a quick POST request to
| save session state or whatever before it dies.
| duxup wrote:
| I suppose you're doing what might be a resource intensive task
| and want to be sure you don't kill the battery.
|
| Granted I get folks might feel a rando website that is resource
| intensive would be horrific, but maybe we're talking about some
| specific web app / use case.
| rwnspace wrote:
| Agreed. Maybe only useful for laptops used as 'kiosks'
| (launching directly to app without a window manager)?
| vortico wrote:
| This list doesn't include the Screen Capture API.
|
| https://www.w3.org/TR/screen-capture/
|
| https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Screen_Capt...
|
| https://www.webrtc-experiment.com/getDisplayMedia/
| geofft wrote:
| A few things that aren't mentioned:
|
| - Web MIDI - access digital keyboards/synthesizers. I believe in
| some browsers there's no prompt, unlike Web USB.
|
| - Screen sharing via getDisplayMedia, analogous to getUserMedia
| for cameras.
|
| - WebRTC, peer-to-peer connections.
|
| - Security keys (WebAuthn), specific support for cheap ($10-$50
| depending on features) devices that do second-factor login to
| websites. Importantly, these devices communicate with the browser
| about which site you're logging into, making for phishing-proof
| logins.
| choward wrote:
| Is WebRTC really peer-to-peer if you need a server?
| root_axis wrote:
| As another commenter points out you can signal however you
| like, but even if a signaling server _was_ required, it 'd
| still be peer to peer since peer to peer accurately describes
| how the packets are routed over the network.
| k__ wrote:
| The server is for convenience.
|
| If you can handle signaling in another way, you're free to do
| so.
|
| When I played around with WebRTC the first time, I did it by
| copying the signaling data via TextAreas and WhatsApp.
| starpilot wrote:
| Can I create water, that I can _feel_?
| jonshariat wrote:
| This is an excellent resource to have when problem solving or
| brainstorming solutions.
|
| Anyone know if something like this exists for Android and iOS?
| Wingy wrote:
| Of course this one goes where you'd expect...
| https://github.com/luruke/browser-2020#web-coffee-api
| GrazeMor wrote:
| The credential management api is super annoying. Many websites
| now have a very annoying sign in with google dialog whenever I
| visit them and there's no way I can find to disable it.
| josh3736 wrote:
| The Credential Management API is more like a API in to the
| browser's password manager. A page can save a
| username/password/token into secure storage (which the browser
| can sync to your other devices) and later retrieve it. This is
| nice because we don't have to rely on autofilling form field
| heuristics.
|
| You're thinking of Google's One Tap, which is just a JS snippet
| that publishers include on their page, and has nothing to do
| with browser APIs. (The OP shows a screenshot of One Tap, which
| is confusing.)
|
| These uBlock filters will make those sign up with Google popups
| go away entirely:
| ||accounts.google.com/gsi/iframe/select?*ux_mode=popup$all
| ||smartlock.google.com
| angelbroz wrote:
| Picture-in-Picture works great for Facebook videos, FB stops
| playing videos when the window is not focused, so this feature
| it's amazing :D
| fortran77 wrote:
| I think WebUSB is all but dead. See:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22228879
| schappim wrote:
| It is very much not dead and is used for educational products
| all the time.
|
| We use it ourselves for our internal ecommerce backend system.
|
| We made our own WebUSB Postage Scales and Label Printer that
| enables 1-click creation of consignment labels.
|
| We pull weights from the postage scales and chuck raw ZPL over
| the wire to the Label Printer.
|
| Being able to skip the bugs in operating system printing queues
| is amazing.
|
| Demo:
|
| https://vimeo.com/334547755/c387957a25
| jan6 wrote:
| I'm rather sad that for example Battery API is deprecated...
| possibly might need a browser-wide toggle, but still... It can
| both be cool, and useful....mostly cool, though... you could have
| a complete web desktop (there several web desktops, and even more
| "fake" ones, like windows93) that shows the status, or a webpage
| that switches to dark mode with minimal javascript and theming,
| when battery is low, or a low distraction writing environment for
| example, that still notifies you of low battery, etc... more and
| more people are using battery-powered devices ;)
| robotnikman wrote:
| IIRC I think it was because it was used to fingerprint browsers
| soheil wrote:
| Web Coffee API link tells you everything you need to know.
| jan6 wrote:
| no, it doesn't tell me why there isn't a Web Team API ;p
| jan6 wrote:
| *Tea, not Team
| beagle3 wrote:
| ... and Safari still holding out on web push - this lack is a
| reason many native apps get written.
| dijit wrote:
| I'm not sure why I read this in a negative tone, this is
| fantastic.
| geofft wrote:
| What's fantastic about native apps?
|
| I mean, I know why nation-state attackers love them - it's
| super easy to exploit them, and once you do, you have full
| access to everything in the user account (including all
| browser login sessions). But what's the advantage to users?
| swiley wrote:
| It's why there are no self hostable chat apps.
|
| A better option would be for users to be able to select
| alternate push servers.
| beagle3 wrote:
| I'm not sure about other browsers, but Firefox asks once per
| website that wants a push, and even that can be turned off.
|
| What's fantastic about not even having the option? What's
| fantastic about having to pay $100/year or reinstall your
| apps once a week, in addition to having Apple MITM any
| notifications?
| thosakwe wrote:
| What's fantastic about a vendor intentionally ignoring
| multiple standards, in favor of their own walled-garden? You
| might be ignoring the wishes of actual users when you say
| it's "fantastic."
| dijit wrote:
| I'm only speaking as a user.
|
| As a user I don't want push notifications from websites.
|
| I know there are some exceptions (like messengers), but
| really, those should be apps because Apples centralised
| push messaging system is better for my battery life.
| nine_k wrote:
| If you don't need that, you can cmd-comma and disable
| that.
|
| But there's no such an easy way to enable a feature you
| need, but which wasn't implemented.
| dijit wrote:
| I do not want an opt out, I do not want it.
|
| I _do_ _not_ want it.
|
| I do not want it to be expected.
|
| I do not want it to be assumed.
|
| I do not want to have to configure anything.
|
| _I DO NOT WANT IT_
| karatekidd32v wrote:
| Wow "Web Coffee API" - something I didn't know I needed
| simonw wrote:
| Suggestion: add a rough indicator of what platforms support each
| feature. You could link to the relevant page on
| https://caniuse.com/ but even a very quick "Supported: Mobile
| Safari, Chrome on Desktop" sentence next to each one would be
| enormously useful.
| brundolf wrote:
| Each link already goes to MDN, which has its own rough chart of
| browser support
| nixpulvis wrote:
| I clicked the Web Credentials link, and was disappointed to
| be redirected to google's docs :P
|
| https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
| US/docs/Web/API/Credential_...
| brundolf wrote:
| Ah. Well at least some of them go to MDN...
| Nextgrid wrote:
| I am concerned that the "dark mode" and "reduce motion" detection
| features can be used for browser & OS fingerprinting. Does anyone
| know if any countermeasures are in place against that?
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