webusb VS postgres-wasm

> WebUSB is actually a W3C open standard.

This is misleading at best. Here’s what the actual spec says <https://wicg.github.io/webusb/>:

> This specification was published by the Web Platform Incubator Community Group. It is not a W3C Standard nor is it on the W3C Standards Track.

It’s an experimental spec by Google (observe the affiliation of the three editors: all Google); Mozilla has adopted a negative position on it <https://mozilla.github.io/standards-positions/#webusb>; WebKit has not remarked upon it.

This is such a lame argument. You want it to be true but have no evidence that it actually is true.

A lot of the Chrome team's "standards" have problems with accessibility, workability on mobile, security[0], privacy[1], or just battery life. Some are neat experiments that are or only will be used in the wild by advertisers to track and identify users.

Because the Safari/WebKit team doesn't have to chase users for revenue like Mozilla does they can afford to be more conservative with what Google "standards" they support. Being able to offer a tighter privacy posture or efficiency is part of the iOS/macOS sales pitch.

[0] https://github.com/WICG/webusb/issues/50

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2021/4/16/22387492/google-floc-ad-t...

Limiting it to installed apps still has the problem of users blindly agreeing to something that is fundamentally super dangerous. I don’t believe installing PWAs currently exposes any new security surface, so this would be a significant change, and worse still a persistent hazard with probably no indication of what’s going on when it’s in use. I think there’s still potential in the general concept, but it’d take work and is certainly not ready yet in any browser.

Yes, certain classes are restricted from access via WebUSB for security, https://wicg.github.io/webusb/#protected-interface-classes. But as the note says, it’s about balance: that list is necessary for security, but not sufficient.

I used https://wasm.supabase.com/ to make sure some SQL commands I was writing for a blog were correct.

I miss a feature where I can share a link with some data/schema pre-seeded (maybe from a gist?)

We achieve this by mounting a compressed 9P filesystem in the VM. 9P provides a Python script which takes a filesystem folder,renames every file an 8-character name and produces a filesystem.json file representing a nested structure with files, original file names, sizes, etc.

maybe https://wasm.supabase.com tech?

Hey HN, we’re excited about this launch. This was a collaborative effort with the team at Snaplet [0].

postgres-wasm is an embeddable Linux VM with Postgres installed, which runs inside a browser. It provides some neat features: persisting state to browser, restoring from pg_dump, logical replication from a remote database, etc.

The idea was inspired by CrunchyData’s HN post about a month ago [1]. We love the possibilities of Postgres+WASM, and so Supabase & Snaplet teamed up to create an open source version. The linked blog post explains the technical difficulties we encountered, and the architecture decisions we made.

We’re still working hard on this, but it’s at a good “MVP” stage where you can run it yourself. Snaplet are working on a feature where you can drag-and-drop a snapshot into your browser to restore the state from any backup. Supabase are exploring ways we can run the entire Supabase stack inside the browser. You can find the Snaplet repo here [2], and the Supabase fork here [3]. There’s very little difference between these two, we just have a different browser UI.

Both Supabase team and the Snaplet team will be in here commenting if you want to know anything else about the technical details.

[0] Snaplet: [https://www.snaplet.dev/](https://www.snaplet.dev/)

[1] Crunchy post: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32498435](https://news....

[2] Snaplet repo: [https://github.com/snaplet/postgres-wasm](https://github.com...

[3] Supabase fork: [https://github.com/supabase-community/postgres-wasm](https:/...