this post was submitted on 08 Aug 2023
1933 points (98.9% liked)
Firefox
17302 readers
901 users here now
A place to discuss the news and latest developments on the open-source browser Firefox
founded 4 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I kind of see the point in this.
Things I can do with Chrome'ish browsers:
All this with a single browser, no 3rd party applications. I think it's called WebSerial and it's a neat feature. Quite sad that Firefox doesn't have it.
If you can really overwrite your operating system with your web browser, that sounds like a security nightmare.
There are multiple steps in between for installations, but yeah the attack surface is quite large…
You have to manually allow bootloader unlocking from within your phone's developer menu which is hidden by default, and then you need to boot your phone into the bootloader menu. Only then will the browser be allowed to interact with the phone, and even then you get messages on the phone that you have to confirm to allow anything to happen.
Nobody's accidentally going to replace the OS on their phone by visiting a website.
It's a protocol/interface for writing to USB. So whatever you can do over the USB cable with software, you can do from the browser.