standards-positions VS webcontainer-core

You can check why Mozilla and Apple have opted to not support this.

https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/issues/154

https://github.com/WebKit/standards-positions/issues/28

Neither Mozilla or Webkit are satisfied that the proposal is safe by default, and contains footguns for the user that can be pretty destructive.

FWIW Mozilla updated their position on Web Serial API to "neutral" and clarified that they might be okay with enabling the API with an add-on.

https://mozilla.github.io/standards-positions/#webserial

Allowing serial but not HID would be really strange. With HID you get standard identifiers that let you filter out devices that are too dangerous for the web. With serial you get nothing. Even if you know a device is dangerous, there's no way to protect users from it.

Hasn't FireFox been dragging their asses on @scope? https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/issues/472

It took years to just convince them of the need for it. And I'm not sure anyone got convinced vs Chrome had already shipped it and Safari has it planned so they caved in.

Hard to believe FireFox used to be a leader of the modern web.

As mentioned by others, OK idea, but not a fan that this isn't standardized. After a quick search+peruse, these seem to indicate that it's not around the corner either. Happy (/hope) to be corrected.

https://github.com/whatwg/html/issues/4180

https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/issues/990

Mozilla's position on these specs is nicely outlined publicly and transparently as part of their standards-positions project: https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/issues/100

I'm kinda glad it's not implemented in my browser, to be honest, because the whole thing seems like a security nightmare.

It's a shame it impacts some hobby usecases, but I don't think this outweighs the reasoning set out on the GitHub issue.

This should have big warnings on it. Some of these are not web standards; they are features implemented unilaterally by Google in Blink that have been explicitly rejected by both Mozilla and Apple on privacy and security grounds.

Take Web Bluetooth, for example:

Mozilla:

> This model is unsustainable and presents a significant risk to users and their devices.

— https://mozilla.github.io/standards-positions/#web-bluetooth

Apple:

> Here are some examples of features we have decided to not yet implement due to fingerprinting, security, and other concerns, and where we do not yet see a path to resolving those concerns

— https://webkit.org/tracking-prevention/

This is Microsoft’s Embrace, Extend, and Extinguish bullshit applied to the web platform by Google. Google keeps implementing these things despite all other major rendering engines rejecting them, convinces people that they are part of the web, resulting in sites like this, then people start asking why Firefox and Safari are “missing functionality”. These are not part of the web platform, they are Google APIs that have been explicitly rejected.

Is BLE a PWA requirement? I think they explained their position pretty well here, regardless of whether I agree:

https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/issues/95#iss...

I took a glance at Can I Use what the difference between the last public release of Firefox and Chrome is [1] and they don't really have that big of a difference in the eyes of normal use-cases? Some of these aren't implemented purely because of privacy reasons, the proposals aren't finished yet or complexity [2].

Why would Firefox need to change to Chromium engine? The only websites I notice that don't work with Firefox is because of user-agent targetting or just putting 5-second time-outs in Youtube code on non-chrome webbrowsers [3].

Can you give some examples of websites not working on Firefox?

[1] https://caniuse.com/?compare=chrome+120%2Cfirefox+121&compar...

[2] https://mozilla.github.io/standards-positions/

[3] https://www.neowin.net/news/youtube-seemingly-intentionally-...

Mozilla are dragging their heels on @scope:

https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/issues/472

https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/ideas/implement-css-scope-rul...

Someone who clearly didn't get it was wasting three years time "well actually"ing everything. The latest news is "it's worth prototyping". Meanwhile Chrome has released it(steam rolled?) and Safari has it in tech preview.

I question if FireFox has the resources to keep up with the pace of the modern web.

How does it work? There is no backend whatsoever. The API Security Academy leverages WebContainers, a new technology that allows running full-blown node instances directly in the browser. Each WebContainer contains a live GraphQL application, so you'll not only understand why a vulnerability is risky, but also how to exploit it and, most importantly, how to fix it.

StackBlitz made the claim "... run Node.js, entirely inside your browser" #658, then had to revise it's claim to "We currently do not expose a way to use WebContainer outside of StackBlitz.com,".

> Wasm though seems like the likely general heir, and will have many different offerings for how to do that (Deno being one!).

I was recently blown away by some ideas that StackBlitz [0] apply based on WebContainers. The idea of a "server in the browser", they allow you to run Node-based environment like that via Wasm.

[0] https://stackblitz.com/

[1] https://webcontainers.io/

See https://webcontainers.io.

This very simple fact is well known flaw, which was already often criticized and asked for solutions by users. It doesn't only affect this kind of very exotic bootstrap applications but also significantly limits rusts usefulness in many other areas. Pure browser based scientific code documentation and example notebooks (e.g. jupyterLite) and sandboxed CI and IDE solutions (e.g. web containers) as available for many other languages are simply not available for rust because of this very fundamental issue.

Looks like they plan to open it. From the FAQ section of README (https://github.com/stackblitz/webcontainer-core#faqs):

> Is there a developer API?

I'm skeptical about stackblitz claims. The last time I checked that is closed source code https://github.com/stackblitz/webcontainer-core/issues/658.

StackBlitz claimed https://blog.stackblitz.com/posts/introducing-webcontainers/ to have implemented Node.js in the browser, though I have not observed any evidence of that being true and correct https://github.com/stackblitz/webcontainer-core/issues/658.

The other honorable mention is StackBlitz, a web-based web editor for making containers that run Javascript applications. Interestingly, StackBlitz is championing WebContainers, a technology that allows developers to start NodeJS servers within the browser. The downside is, this technology only works with Javascript-based projects (NodeJS, NextJS, etc). I include it here because WebContainers could easily be extended to support other languages via WASM, like Ruby. I’ll also add in Buildah, a tool for building OCI images. I won’t say much about this tool because it’s designed for building images; you still need another service, like Podman, to actually create the containers.