I don’t have much else to add. You’ve clearly thought about this topic (WebUSB) more than I have, and I’ve given people grief in the past for similarly thin arguments slandering Signal over “what if” type scenarios.

In the end I am saying I wish we didn’t have things that we already have, which is ultimately pointless anyway. I wish the nature of interacting with a website was much more strictly one directional. I wish it was never considered appropriate for a remote server to learn about or interact with my own requesting hardware. There are a hundred other things I don’t want that we have, many much more impactful than this. You seem much more open-minded, and regardless clearly a lot of the rest of the world agrees with you.

Think we just disagree, but I also don’t mean to blow WebUSB out of proportion. Plenty worse things for me to get worked up about that also aren’t going anywhere.

Sorry, when I said “sky is falling” I meant a general erosion of user security and privacy, when using our “own” devices. Things like even systemd working to accommodate OS-level age verification these days. To me, the capability of WebUSB is a bad idea, because I simply never want that path for potential data flow even available, for the things my machine is used to do.

I do see what you mean about use cases like you’re describing, though, for flashing devices, and I concede the point that flashing random binaries isn’t meaningfully better and probably is a bit worse.

I still don’t want that capability anywhere near my own machine, for all of the not-that-use-case reasons. I do see your use case, do you see my concern?

I don’t use Chromium browsers. I’m afraid of the sky falling (it is). I have been “afraid” of it for a good long while, and it is occurring.

That’s general - in this specific case, by my reckoning, it can never be safe for a website to understand, in any depth, the hardware of the machine requesting it.

Ah my bad. Commenter you’re replying to is saying we never should have built this capability, and it’s a terrible idea (my own words now) to weaken boundaries to this degree, it can never be done “safely”.

But it does exist, and your own request to opt in is reasonable and would mark an improvement.

it doesn’t really need to, other than simplicity for the end user

Not being a jerk, trying to be succinct, but this is you missing or disregarding a crucially important point, in a dozen words.