In the past, browsers used an algorithm which only denied setting wide-ranging cookies for top-level domains with no dots (e.g. com or org). However, this did not work for top-level domains where only third-level registrations are allowed (e.g. co.uk). In these cases, websites could set a cookie for .co.uk which would be passed onto every website registered under co.uk.
Since there was and remains no algorithmic method of finding the highest level at which a domain may be registered for a particular top-level domain (the policies differ with each registry), the only method is to create a list. This is the aim of the Public Suffix List.
(https://publicsuffix.org/learn/)
God I hate the web. The engineering equivalent of a car made of duct tape.
Kind of. But do you have a better proposition?
End of random rant.
But then you would loose plattform independency, the main selling point of this atrocity.
Having all those APIs in a sandbox that mostly just work on billion devices is pretty powerful and a potential succesor to HTML would have to beat that, to be adopted.
The best thing to happen, that I can see, is that a sane subset crystalizes, that people start to use dominantly, with the rest becoming legacy, only maintained to have it still working.
But I do dream of a fresh rewrite of the web since university (and the web was way slimmer back then), but I got a bit more pragmatic and I think I understood now the massive problem of solving trusted human communication better. It ain't easy in the real world.
This all just drives a need to come up with ever more tacked-on protection schemes because browsers have big targets painted on them.
WebUSB I don't use or would miss it right now, but .. the main potential use case is security and it sounds somewhat reasonable
"Use in multi-factor authentication
WebUSB in combination with special purpose devices and public identification registries can be used as key piece in an infrastructure scale solution to digital identity on the internet."
You have sites now that let you debug microcontrollers on your browser, super cool.
Same thing but with firmware updates in the browser. Cross platform, replaced a mess of ugly broken vendor tools.
You remove that, and videoconferencing (for business or person to person) has to rely on downloading an app, meaning whoever is behind the website has to release for 10-15 OSes now. Some already do, but not everyone has that budget so now there's a massive moat around it.
> But do we need e.g serial port or raw USB access straight from a random website
Being able to flash an IoT (e.g. ESP32) device from the browser is useful for a lot of people. For the "normies", there was also Stadia allowing you to flash their controller to be a generic Bluetooth/usb one on a website, using that webUSB. Without it Google would have had to release an app for multiple OSes, or more likely, would have just left the devices as paperweights. Also, you can use FIDO/U2F keys directly now, which is pretty good.
Browsers are the modern Excel, people complain that they do too much and you only need 20%. But it's a different 20% for everyone.