Intent to Ship: SerialPort forget()
François Beaufort 🇫🇷
Contact emails
Explainer
N/A
Specification
https://github.com/WICG/serial/pull/161
https://wicg.github.io/serial/#forget-method
Summary
Following the recent HIDDevice[1] and USBDevice[2] forget() additions to the web platform, the SerialPort forget() method allows web developers to voluntarily revoke a permission to a SerialPort that was granted by a user.
[1] https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/g/blink-dev/c/Fk-IJF63UWc
[2] https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/g/blink-dev/c/pSM2W0TtKEI/
Blink component
Motivation
Some sites may not be interested in retaining long-term permissions to access a serial port. For example, for an educational web application used on a shared computer with many devices, a large number of accumulated user-generated permissions creates a poor user experience.
In addition to user agent mitigations to avoid this problem, such as defaulting to a session scoped permission on the first request or expiring infrequently used permissions, it should be possible for the site itself to clean up user-generated permissions it is no longer interested in retaining.
// Request a serial port.
const port = await navigator.serial.requestPort();
// Then later... revoke permission to the serial port.
await port.forget();
TAG review
Following recent HIDDevice forget() approval [1], a new TAG review does not seem necessary.
[1] https://github.com/w3ctag/design-reviews/issues/703
TAG review status
N/A
Risks
Interoperability and Compatibility
This small addition to the SerialPort object does not change the overall status of Serial API interoperability or compatibility.
Signals from other implementations (Gecko, WebKit):
Gecko: No Signal [1]
WebKit: No Signal [1]
Web / Framework developers: Positive https://github.com/WICG/serial/issues/132
[1] Both Gecko and WebKit are unlikely to object to this feature specifically, but object to the overall Serial API as a whole, hence it doesn't make sense to bug them with specific questions on this.
Activation:
This feature can't be polyfilled. It should be fairly trivial for developers to adopt this new feature.
Debuggability
No specific DevTools changes are required. This feature is treated like any other JS method.
Note that exposing DevTools debugging support for device-access APIs (Serial API included) is discussed at https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=1142566.
Is this feature fully tested by web-platform-tests?
No, because permission storage is implemented outside of Blink and so isn’t testable by web-platform-tests. Some tests that only verify the presence of interfaces and attributes will be available at https://wpt.fyi/results/serial though. I’ll also add manual tests.
Requires code in //chrome?
Yes, permission storage is implemented in //chrome.
Tracking bug
https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=1299351
Estimated milestones
102
Link to entry on the Chrome Platform Status
Mike Taylor
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Yoav Weiss
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Chris Harrelson
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François Beaufort 🇫🇷
Could you fill in an answer to the question about WebView compatibility? Is this API exposed on webview and is it tested there?
Chris Harrelson
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