> There is no reason whatsoever to allow remote access to USB devices.
Unless you want to connect your local USB device to some VM in the cloud. Which is the direct use case that came up when this came up in discussion with Reilly Grant when we were both at VMware. It comes up surprisingly often as a requested feature, as IT organizations get increasingly lazy/less funded/laid off and don't want to have to install clients or anything on local machines, just pop open a browser, point it at the VM and connect up the device.
Not that I'm advocating for this in any way... I thought it was pretty out there (along with WebMIDI), but hey, why not, the Web Browser is the One True Platform and everyone and their parent company and sister company has nearly quit doing native application development on any OS (as sad as that makes me).
If you want to connect a USB device to the cloud, that's great. All you need is a usb<->socks proxy running on your local machine, tunneling USB traffic to the remote server.
Why should we build this functionality into the browser? Is it really that much more convenient than installing an app to run the proxy?
The use case you describe is sufficiently rare, that if you need it, downloading an app should not be a high cost to pay. If only 1% of browser users need this USB proxy, why expose an additional attack surface for the 99% who do not need it?
I'm thinking of HTML5 media tags. There's a standard way to specify that something is a piece of media to play, but the browser needs to also have the right codec for that media.
There could be something similar for USB, where there might not even be any "codecs" (drivers) included by default in browsers, but where there's a defined method of making USB devices available.
You'd still have to install a plugin for each device type that your browser doesn't natively understand, but standardization for how to make specific device types available to the browser would be much simpler. And there could be "rewriting proxy" drivers available for improved security which limits what requests that are possible, preventing most hardware exploits.
Although this might still be too much work for little gain.
If you need to install a plugin, why not install an app? Presumably plugins will need to be written for each different browser, just as apps need to be written for each different OS. So there would be very little gain.
> Why should we build this functionality into the browser? Is it really that much more convenient than installing an app to run the proxy?
Apparently it is, given how highly requested of a feature it is to have everything you could do with VMRC available through the web browser with no plugins or local software.
Again, I still don't think it's a good idea either, but I also don't like a lot of the crazy shit built into modern web browsers for maybe the 1% users, like the mentioned WebMIDI.
Even if you want to remotely attach a USB device, doing it through the browser is a severely silly way to do it.
Why not attach USB devices over IRC? Or SAMBA? Just because it is possible, doesn't mean that it's reasonable or good.
Unless you want to connect your local USB device to some VM in the cloud. Which is the direct use case that came up when this came up in discussion with Reilly Grant when we were both at VMware. It comes up surprisingly often as a requested feature, as IT organizations get increasingly lazy/less funded/laid off and don't want to have to install clients or anything on local machines, just pop open a browser, point it at the VM and connect up the device.
Not that I'm advocating for this in any way... I thought it was pretty out there (along with WebMIDI), but hey, why not, the Web Browser is the One True Platform and everyone and their parent company and sister company has nearly quit doing native application development on any OS (as sad as that makes me).