alt Hacker NewsThe web and native app platforms have very different security models.
Nobody is vetting websites for you. There is no guarantee the same company operates a website today that did yesterday. There is no obvious distribution or regulatory authority instituting penalties for illegal actions (and often is no legal presence in a country when illegal actions take place).
That means for the web, every consent prompt has a large, sometimes even unbounded amount of harm behind it if the user picks incorrectly, and browsers have limited capacity to help them pick correctly outside of reactive block lists once substantial harm has been done and recognized.
This is why, for example, the major browsers have all moved to restricting web extensions behind their own review processes/stores, and put restrictions that make unaudited web extensions difficult to install outside of development workflows. The risk is just too great.
Chrome pushed many of these API early in the Chromebook product cycle, because their idea was that you would only build apps using web technologies. I somewhat doubt they would have pushed for WebUSB themselves if Chromebook started in its current state, where it primarily runs android apps and is about to transition to be android-based.
> The web and native app platforms have very different security models.
Yes, and as a result, the web is much more sandboxed than native app stores (which are mostly based on the illusion that vetting apps can somehow achieve better security than minimizing what resources apps can access in the first place and making access more fine grained).
This is exactly why I'd rather run e.g. shady USB aftermarket firmware flashing apps in my browser (where I know they can at most compromise the device I'm flashing) than as a native app (where USB access is the default and requires zero permissions to be approved).
> This is why, for example, the major browsers have all moved to restricting web extensions behind their own review processes/stores, and put restrictions that make unaudited web extensions difficult to install outside of development workflows. The risk is just too great.
Web extensions very often have access to your complete browsing data, including all cookies. That's orders of magnitude more risky than access to an explicitly selected USB device, in my view.
> I somewhat doubt they would have pushed for WebUSB themselves if Chromebook started in its current state, where it primarily runs android apps and is about to transition to be android-based.
Android has an USB API as well, and if Google only wanted "apps" to have USB access, nothing was stopping them from making Web USB "Chrome App Store" only.