451
8BitDo announce 'Ultimate Software Online' to update controllers in your browser to help Linux gamers
(www.gamingonlinux.com)
this post was submitted on 28 Aug 2026
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All of these wed based uber-projects are built on Chrome. This is bad. This gives more control to google and strengthens their strangle hold over web technologies.
It's also bad because why the fuck should a web browser have that much access to the hardware to begin with?!
Considering they made Chrome an entire OS... It was sort of necessary for that and probably minimal to bring it to the regular desktop browser.
Otherwise it doesn't really need to, other than simplicity for the end user. Being able to just go to the website regardless of platform and not having to install anything, or keep anything up to date, is a nice end user experience.
That's both plausible and insightful on your part. Thanks!
That said, just because they could easily do it on the non-ChromeOS version of the browser doesn't mean they should have.
Chrome OS existed long before this API, it has a Linux base to handle this kind of thing.
Not being a jerk, trying to be succinct, but this is you missing or disregarding a crucially important point, in a dozen words.
Also why the fuck is the OS giving the web browser the option of giving it that access to the hardware?
As long as it's doable from userspace the OS doesn't know what's a browser or what is being controlled with external code. Blame the concept of ambient authority
Cause WebUSB still only exists on Chrome, even though Mozilla and Apple had 9 years to catch up: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/WebUSB_API#browser_compatibility
Maybe some of the other browsers should implement the tech needed to do this kind of thing then? Cause as far as I know, Chrome is the only browser that can give a websites access to USB.
Because it's complex, a security problem and largely unneccessary.
It seems pretty necessary for doing this kind of universal update system to me. If you've got a way to do it without it though, please share.
Jesus fucking christ can't you people ever just let something be good for once
Adding security, compatability, and vendor lock-in issues in exchange for convenience is not a good thing. Remember ActiveX and Silverlight? They forced users into uning IE. I am still finding industrial applications whos only config page is some ancient, IE only, nightmare.
Cant wait for Adobe Flash to make a comeback resulting in us being forced to use it to do something asinine like pay rent
In this case the spec is published, so it wouldn't be a lock-in or compatibility issue if the other vendors didn't lock themselves out.
Security, I get, but when I've used it to flash esp32s before the user agent pops up a box asking me which device I want to give access to before the website sees anything, so it's not transparent and it doesn't give it access to everything on my system.
I use Firefox all the time, but keep a Chromium on my system basically for stuff like this occasionally, and also web calls because Firefox's implementation of the audio API doesn't let me change microphones in the webapp, it just exposes one mic, and I've had issues with that before, so I join all calls in Chromium.