Maybe I'm just in the minority, I just don't see what purpose this serves.
Besides my mouse, I just don't have anything that uses USB. My phone generally isn't connected, I've not needed a USB drive in years and I struggle to think of a situation where I have a product that uses USB that I need to use my laptop for but also don't want the software controlling it installed on that laptop.
This is a good point that tends to get drowned out by the severe privacy and security concerns. WebUSB provides zero value to the overwhelming majority of end users, and minimal value to the handful of us who have ever used it at all.
That's not true at all, flashing ESP32 devices has been made WAAAAAY easier with WebUSB than before. Many keyboards have stopped requiring installing third-party software/drivers to customize them after WebUSB became a thing. The benefits are huge.
While that shows a good use case for a minority, it doesn't refute at all “zero benefit to the overwhelming majority of end users”. Most end users don't have configurable keyboards, and even less program microcontrollers.
This is why it is contentious: On the one hand you have a great QoL benefits for a minority of users who are more than willing to accept the potential fingerprinting risk and consider other dangers to be overblown hypotheticals, or are technical enough to mitigate those issues. On the other you have the vast majority who have no need of the feature at all, and are probably unaware of any risk and will be until it becomes apparent in a can't-be-undone manner. Google sides with the former, Firefox and Apple err the other way. At what point a small potential risk for everybody is worth QoL benefits for a relative few, is the main point of contention (the second largest probably being a mix of “is the risk really a risk anyway?” or “but you'll be fingerprinted to buggery & back anyway so what difference does this bit-or-few of data really make?”).
A side issue is the concern about the browser becoming a bloated almost-but-not-quite full OS, and a huge mess that needs much effort to maintain to keep its growing attack surface defended.
Besides making flashing esp32 devices easy there is also another niche use-case for webusb and that is Web MiniDisc; keeping those recorders alive long past manufacturing EOL.
To a relatively small group of enthusiasts, sure. I'd love to see numbers on the percentage of browser-users who own keyboards which require regular firmware updates..,
Who cares about what the plebs do? By that logic extension support should be removed from browsers outright, since extensions are just used by a small group of enthusiasts.
This is effectively part of Google's official argument for making ad blocking more difficult (the unofficial argument being that they actively don't care if ad blocking is more difficult, for obvious reasons).
The use cases for extensions cover a much larger segment of browser users than programmable keyboards and microcontrollers though: there is a lot more mass appeal for things like languagetool/grammarly, ad-blockers and other page tidiers, tools that are useful for devs¹, and so forth.
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[1] I'd put money on even the vast majority of front-end devs not touching microcontrollers or having programmable keyboards.
I fail to see what is gained to flash ESP32 from the browser vs from a small software gui you can run on your computer (and offline as well).
Saving the 1 minute setup time needed to install the software ? The rest is basically the same procedure.
When developers create Electon apps, HN complains about it. When developers then use web serial to avoid having to install Electron apps, HN complains about it.
And before anyone says “just write a native app”, let me know how many small businesses you run where you can afford to employ developers to create and manage multiple apps across platforms?
Maybe you struggle to imagine uses for USB because you "just don't have anything that uses USB". You could just as easily argue that USB itself shouldn't exist using that logic. And you'd be just as wrong.
A while back I was setting up some LD2410 radar sensors. Of course the shitty Chinese level of support is a shady exe that only runs on Windows.
Then I found this: https://github.com/albertnis/ld2410-configurator which did the job by just doing the whole process in a browser. I was really amazed that this was even a thing at the time, and it's certainly a great way to do multiplatform serial interfaces.
I have so much shitty desktop software that could easily be a web app. The steelseries software that manages my usb headset, the crappy Garmin app that connects to my watch, my Corsair keyboard software, that awful Logitech management software, etc.
This entire thread is a symptom of the lack of interest and stagnation of desktop software APIs. Does the Logitech mouse software need to consume 1GB of RAM so I can map a button? Of course not, but Logitech chose that approach because I dunno, trying to write a simple Cocoa app for Mac was too hard, made their brains hurt, so the complex job of “sending predefined configuration parameters in hex over Bluetooth” turns into “ship a small web browser because web devs are cheap as chips and wRiTe OnCE RuN eVeRyWhErE”
GP is lamenting the apps ship an entire self-contained, often outdated, browser one must run and update separately for each app because they are desktop apps. Web apps just run as a page in your browser like any other site. Not everyone who has an issue with a former has an issue with the latter.
Web apps don't have to only be sourced from a live hosted website, though that is a particularly convenient way to grab them (or just temporarily use them without installing as a PWA instead). https://github.com/pwa-builder/PWABuilder
Besides my mouse, I just don't have anything that uses USB. My phone generally isn't connected, I've not needed a USB drive in years and I struggle to think of a situation where I have a product that uses USB that I need to use my laptop for but also don't want the software controlling it installed on that laptop.