I mean, you got my upvote already, but one big reason is that Robertson wanted to control all the manufacturing of the screws and the bits. Phillips licensed his patent out and let anyone make them just taking a tiny licensing fee. Made a fortune on volume. Robertson: good engineer, bad businessman.
I don't fully agree with these, but these are the cases I've heard of:
I think these are better served with extensions or specific browser protocols that communicate with native apps in order to keep the crazy web world more isolated from the high-value computer world, but what do I know? My guess is that someone at Google went "You know, we're creating a lot of these specific protocols to communicate with webcams, printers, and now we want to do authentication dongles. You know what? They all use USB? Why don't we just create a general way to access USB?"
In the immortal words of Dr. Ian Malcolm:
I cannot +1 this hard enough. There was once upon a time, back in the Darwin days, when I had my eyes on a Macbook as my next computer. Apple Silicon almost got me there again. I'm itching for a Snapdragon X Elite Oryon OMGLOLBBQ SBC, but I'm not holding my breath. I bet laptop makers snap up all the chips for 2024, and then I get one in 2025.
There's the topic of this conversation, WebUSB. I happen to believe that a missing feature here for Firefox is a good thing, mind you...
@egerlach
@lemmy.ca