I would suggest reading the lengthy discussion that was had regarding this feature in Firefox[1] before brazenly claiming it's an obsolete browser.
[1] https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/issues/194
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I love firefox except for a fairly recent feature adopted by chrome, which is the ability to update usb device firmware through a web browser via the Web Serial API. I do a lot…
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| 2020 | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 12 | 0 | 12 |
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| 2023 | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 39 | 6 | 33 |
| 2024 | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 30 | 3 | 27 |
| 2025 | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 29 | 0 | 29 |
| 2026 (partial) | 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 26 | 1 | 25 |
From the project README
An excerpt from the repository, fetched Nov 13, 2026.
Read the project’s introduction
Mozilla's Positions on Emerging Web Specifications
See the dashboard for Mozilla's current positions.
What is this Repository?
This repo is where Mozilla decides and documents what it thinks about
emerging technical specifications for the Web. Typically they're draft documents in the
IETF, W3C (including the WICG),
WHATWG, and Ecma TC39, but they could come from
elsewhere too.
Having a clear Mozilla position on these specifications helps us align our thinking and communicate
it clearly to these standards bodies, as well as other browsers.
Implementation status (or even intention) isn't tracked here; see dev-platform.
Possible Specification Positions
We will seek to apply one of three labels to new specifications:
positive - Mozilla regards this work as a potential improvement to the web.
neutral - Mozilla is not convinced of the merits of this work, but does not see any significant negative potential.
negative - Mozilla believes that pursuing this work in its current form would not be good for the web.
These positions will be based on our best assessment of the current state of the specification and
the potential for it to benefit our users and the web as a whole. We consider the intended purpose
and the design fundamentals of each specification. Incomplete documentation, minor issues, or lack of
interoperability testing are not reasons for a negative position, provided that intent is clear.
We might also use the following labels for specifications where we have not formed a position:
defer - Mozilla takes no position on this work.
under consideration - Mozilla has not taken a position on this work and is gathering more information.
What about Firefox?
A position here does not address whether Mozilla will commit resources to developing a
specification. In particular, taking a position does not commit Mozilla to implementing a
specification in Firefox.
Requesting a Position
See our contribution guidelines for information about how you can participate.
Building locally
See DEVELOP.md.
Read the full README on GitHubWhat Hacker News says
30 sourcesIndeed they haven't. They are, at most, drafts or even "draft community reports".
And yet, Chrome goes through a superficial standards-track-like process:
- implements them behind a feature flag
- publishes a draft of the standard
- asks other browser vendors for their position on "emerging standard". Example, https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/issues/459
- ignores feedback, and enables by default (see link above)
- advertises as fait accompli (example, https://web.dev/hid-examples/)
- includes these APIs in standard web API counts https://web-confluence.appspot.com/#!/confluence
- proceeds to gaslight other browser vendors as being too slow, holding back the web, holding back innovation etc. through dozens of talking heads with outsized influence (Alex Russel, Justin Fagnani, ... to many to list)
In Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemonySeeing Firefox teams callous take on a critically important Native file system feature [1], it comes at no surprise that major products are dropping Firefox compatibility.
[1] https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/issues/154
In Photoshop’s journey to the webThe quote the article is based around is discussing a new web API in the context of deciding what Mozilla thinks about it. If Mozilla isn't going to have any opinions on new web APIs, then what is even the point of Firefox? (Disclaimer, I work on Firefox but I know anything about specs.)
https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/issues/453
In Mozilla says Chrome’s latest feature enables surveillanceRequest for Mozilla Position on an Emerging Web Specification
2 points · Open discussionthese user agent values leak data about your system, why would you want them to be sent unencrypted? loads and loads of new web APIs are moving to HTTPS only. this is not a Google specific thing.
It's worth to note that Mozilla's position on this proposal is "harmful": https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/issues/552
In Chrome user agent string reduction> Consensus & Standardization
> Firefox: Negative [1]
> Safari: Negative [2]
However, I fully expect Chrome to ship it in stable sometime soon, like they do with dozens of other APIs.
There are now four different half-baked storage/file api proposals, at least one of them is already in stable Chrome... it's a mess.
[1] https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/issues/481
[2] https://lists.webkit.org/pipermail/webkit-dev/2021-February/...
In A future for SQL on the webSafari is, in fact, fine. The "Safari bad" argument comes from people who are keen on turning the Web into something it can never be: an app platform.
I very very very much prefer the "bad Safari" to the shiny Chrome which pushes (and ships) "standards" so bad other browser developers can't even understand them [1]
[1] https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/issues/459
Edit: grammar and typos
In Hobson's Browser: How Apple, Facebook and Google broke the mobile browser marketDowngrade User Agent Client Hints to 'harmful'
150 points · Open discussion> Mozilla used to be the beacon of Web standards, what happened to them
They still are. Only now Google inundates everyone with Google-designed Chrome-internal "standards", and releases them against any objections.
See WebHID as the best example of this: Issue https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/issues/459#is... and timeline https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27512354
In IndexedDB is completely broken in latest Safari> Either way, if every few months Chrome can genuinely churn out hundreds of APIs that developers genuinely want and use (a big caveat!) and Firefox/Safari can't keep up, then that's game over.
It very much is, and has been for a while: Google completely dominates all of web-related standards bodies. And the specs that are rushed to completion in Chrome are more likely than not to be fully authored by Googlers only (sometimes with egregious disregard for standards work, see WebHID [1]).
[1] Issue https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/issues/459#is... and timeline https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27512354
In IndexedDB is completely broken in latest Safari> FileSystem Access is a significant security risk and we're not going to implement this
Right now the Mozilla position is 'defer', not 'harmful'. See https://mozilla.github.io/standards-positions/#native-file-s....
That means yes, they're not implemented today, but they're open to doing so later on, given further specification development and real-world investigation to confirm that the security implications are minimal.
> No, we don't want fifteen different file access apis
Looks like there is some ongoing work to synchronize these APIs to resolve that concern: https://docs.google.com/document/d/121OZpRk7bKSF7qU3kQLqAEUV...
---
I 100% agree Google is too aggressive at publishing and releasing these features without widespread consensus from other vendors. If they were doing so with just origin trials or behind a flag that would seem rea
Read the rest
sonable to me, but the widespread release is surely going to cause problems for these specs, when they must be aware that further development and changes is going to be required. I'm not clear how they intend to mature these standards without breaking the early adopters.
I don't agree they're not desirable features though. Honestly I desperately wish Safari & Firefox would engage more and drive these specs themselves! It would be better to get their voices in the decisions that'll define these specs, rather than letting Google define the future of the web all by themselves.
There's clearly demand for these features (read the comments of https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/issues/154 for some examples). It would be better to have privacy and security baked in with input from a broad group of actors (I think we can all agree that Firefox is going to be a more useful voice than Google in that sense). It's not helpful to let Google run off and write every standard themselves, with other browsers watching from the sidelines until it's sufficiently done (and unchangeable) and then having to either adopt the existing standard as-is by necessity or to refuse to support many real world web applications (for as long as that's tenable).
Make no mistake - Chromium has the market share to be a workable target, and these APIs work well for developers and are genuinely useful. They will be used. There will be (in some areas there already is) a whole world of web apps using these APIs which only work in Chromium by necessity, no matter how much they'd like to support other browsers. As those get adopted by users, that's only going to drive the web further towards Chromium, until other browsers have to die or adopt the (entirely Google-written) standards themselves too to support the next generation of webapps.
This is happening on desktop in some areas already. In IDEs, for example - if you buy any IoT based on Espruino, the primary dev tool only works in Chrome due to WebUSB/WebBluetooth (https://www.espruino.com/Web+IDE), while tools like Godot Editor are already talking about Chrome-only save/load support using these filesystem APIs (https://godotengine.org/article/godot-editor-running-web-bro...), and I'd be extremely surprised if GitHub Codespaces and other tools aren't looking at doing the same. These are popular tools - many users want to use them, and they will have to switch to a Chromium-based browser to do so.
Mobile is somewhat protected due to Safari being the only option on iPhone, but I wouldn't be surprised if the ongoing antitrust cases force them to open that up to make PWAs look like a plausible app store competitor, and the exact same thing happens there.
WebExtensions is a case study of the same effect in the past. Chromium has so much weight that once they fully design and adopt an API and build an ecosystem around it, other browsers have to follow or get cut off. If Firefox & Safari had engaged with WebExtensions much earlier, they could have been driving it themselves and building consensus. Instead, they've had to copy every Google API while just tweaking around the edges.
One exception, interestingly: Brave is doing some intriguing work on driving decentralization APIs for the web (native Web3, native IPFS). It's early days, but I'm hopeful that this might have the same effect in the opposite direction for those features!
> I think you’re discounting that everything Chrome does these days is designed to become a web standard
Indeed. It's rarely designed to be a web standard. However, Chrome rams that through standards body, calls that a standard and enables it by default in Chrome.
Just look at WebHID. Firefox devs couldn't even understand the spec [1], it was so Chrome-specific. Guess what, it's enabled by default in Chrome [2] and Chrome says that it's a standard now [3]. Most of those non-standards are not even out of the "draft" stage of the standards process, with both Safari and Firefox objecting to many, many, many things in the specs.
Google. doesn't. care.
[1] https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/issues/459#is...
[2] https://webapicontroversy.com
[3] https://web.dev/hid/
In Let web applications be file handlersI see a bunch of comments here showing their disdain towards chrome adding more liberal file system access.
As a web developer this is actually a positive move as it gives us the ability to make really powerful apps for the web without having to resort to wasting time in apple's walled garden.
Yes, Firefox [1] thinks this is dangerous, but the points they have put forward are half baked at best. This API is no worse than some of the existing APIs implemented by every browser and contrary to what the name might suggest, does not degrade a user's privacy or security.
[1] https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/issues/154
In Let web applications be file handlers> No one is stopping another company from disrupting Chrome and making their own vision of the web by building a better browser.
It's is almost impossible for anyone to create a new browser. Even for a corporation with near-unlimited resources it would be a daunting task. Hell, Microsoft gave up, and they are definitely not short on resources.
At the time of this writing Chrome ships 7600 web apis [1]. Firefox and Safari ship 6500 and 6300 respectively. Chrome will happily ram its own internal APIs through standards committees with nothing but a lip-service to the other implementors because this only assures Chrome's dominance. This also assures that no other browser will ever appear.
> Many new web technologies like PWAs originated with Chrome. Apple, on their own, would never have pushed for PWAs and even now, their support for them are
Read the rest
lackluster.
Ah yes. The bad-bad Apple. How can Apple not be bad when we have the great saviour of the web, the Saint Disruptor Chrome.
Meanwhile, both Apple and Mozilla are increasingly on the same side with regards to the non-standards that Chrome rams through: they are vocally opposed.
A very-very non-exhaustive list: https://webapicontroversy.com These "disruptions" are so badly specified (read: are so Chrome-only) that sometimes the devs from competing browsers can't even understand them: https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/issues/459#is...
And yet, Chrome will have you believe that these standards are not only there, but that they are complete (so many of them are just drafts that have been cobbled together by some googlers), and that they are immediately available and can be used (they can only be used in Chrome).
[1] https://web-confluence.appspot.com/#!/confluence
Edit: grammar and typos
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