In protest of the web{*} bulldozer, a response to websocket port scanning
The web already has a user-facing permissions system; it wouldn&#x27;t be hard to add many of these under that umbrella (USB, Bluetooth, and Sensors stand out as obvious candidates that should&#x27;ve been behind that barrier from the beginning). Battery Status definitely seems pointless overall.<p>But I don&#x27;t agree with the overall thesis, that the web fundamentally should not get features like these. Though, obviously, some of these &quot;standards&quot; have been rushed through and poorly executed.<p>I think for this we can blame Chromium&#x27;s dominance. As the author said, many of these features were probably motivated by Chrome OS. And the devil&#x27;s bargain of letting Chromium take such complete control over the web is that Google can strongarm whichever new &quot;standards&quot; they like into the Web.<p>The standards committee doesn&#x27;t want WebBatteryStatus? Fine, we&#x27;ll implement it anyway and now Chrome desktop&#x2F;mobile, Chromebooks, and Edge will all have it. Sites that want to use it will probably just use it and throw up a &quot;Use Chrome&quot; notification for Firefox and Safari.