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)

[Thomas Steiner]

On Tue, Dec 23, 2025 at 4:28 PM 'Kagami Rosylight' via dev-pl...@mozilla.org <dev-pl...@mozilla.org> wrote:

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

I've pinged some folks internally, thanks!

 

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "dev-pl...@mozilla.org" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to dev-platform...@mozilla.org.
To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/a/mozilla.org/d/msgid/dev-platform/d7eed720-c993-4ac7-a065-cf589e70bcacn%40mozilla.org.

--

Thomas Steiner, PhD—Developer Relations Engineer (blog.tomayac.com, toot.cafe/@tomayac)

Google Spain, S.L.U.

Torre Picasso, Pl. Pablo Ruiz Picasso, 1, Tetuán, 28020 Madrid, Spain

CIF: B63272603

Inscrita en el Registro Mercantil de Madrid, sección 8, Hoja M­-435397 Tomo 24227 Folio 25

----- BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE -----

Version: GnuPG v2.4.8 (GNU/Linux)

iFy0uwAntT0bE3xtRa5AfeCheCkthAtTh3reSabiGbl0ck

0fjumBl3DCharaCTersAttH3b0ttom.xKcd.cOm/1181.

----- END PGP SIGNATURE -----