Intent to prototype: Add-On-Gated Web Serial

[Greg Stoll]

Summary: The Web Serial API provides a way for websites to read and write from a serial device through script. Such an API can bridge the web and the physical world, by allowing websites to communicate with devices such as microcontrollers, 3D printers, and other serial devices.
Since serial devices are not generally hardened against adversarial input, Firefox will gate this capability behind a site permission add-on, in a very similar way to WebMIDI. See https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/site-permission-add-ons for more information.

Bug: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=926940

Specification: https://wicg.github.io/serial/

Standards Body: Web Platform Incubator Community Group draft report.

Platform coverage: all Desktop OS's (Windows, Mac, Linux)

Preference: dom.webserial.enabled (note that the Web Serial code has not landed yet)

Link to standards-positions discussion: https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/issues/336

Other browsers:

- Blink: Shipped since version 89
- WebKit: negative position ( https://webkit.org/tracking-prevention/#anti-fingerprinting )

web-platform-tests: https://wpt.fyi/results/serial?label=experimental&label=master&aligned

- There will be additional Gecko-specific tests that use a test-only serial interface.

[Kagami Rosylight]

Given there are multiple implementations now, is there a discussion to move it to an actual standards body? (WICG is not a standards body)