alt.hn

5/22/2026 at 3:13:07 AM

Build Adafruit projects right from Firefox

 https://www.firefox.com/en-US/landing/adafruit/

by mch82

5/24/2026 at 5:58:11 PM

WebSerial was just introduced in Firefox 151. It was already available for 5 years in Chromium based browser. It's so new in Firefox that even caniuse is not up-to-date: https://caniuse.com/web-serial.

by geekuillaume

5/24/2026 at 8:01:03 PM

interestingly, MDN web docs claims at the top of the Web Serial page (https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Web_Serial_...) that Chrome does not support it and Firefox does, even though the support table at the bottom shows that it supports more features than Firefox and has for longer

by peesem

5/24/2026 at 6:25:07 PM

Using serial comms from the browser is really important in educational robotics programs. Both First and Vex platforms support it. Kids can access the web based coding environment on their chromebooks, and send code to the robots with a usb cable.

We recently restarted our middle school robotics club. The school had a lot of old Vex EDR equipment for which the coding software is windows only so that really limited what we could do related to coding. Glad to see Firefox getting up to speed on this.

by le-mark

5/24/2026 at 6:20:03 PM

Great to see Firefox getting on board. I wrote an alternative to Arduino's serial plotter that works in Chrome. Hopefully it's not too hard to get Firefox working too? Patches welcome:

https://github.com/skybrian/serialviz

by skybrian

5/24/2026 at 6:19:58 PM

On iOS the page promotes the App Store version of Firefox, which is based on WebKit and doesn’t support Web Serial.

by tech234a

5/24/2026 at 6:52:56 PM

Blame Apple for that.

by darkwater

5/24/2026 at 5:19:12 PM

I used WebSerial + WebSockets during hardware to prototype some connected hardware (on boards that didn’t have WiFi).

Plug in to USB, fire up the web app, and then press a button in NY to light up LEDs in SF – it was exciting stuff!

I never tried actually programming the boards over WebSerial; that obviously opens up many more use cases. I’m thinking about the success that p5.js has had in the creative coding community, largely driven (I think) by a low barrier to entry since it just requires a web browser to get started.

by trainyperson

5/24/2026 at 6:04:09 PM

That's a start at improving something. But it won't rid itself of the Playskool/Fisher-Price gimmick factor or have any lasting effect until we can convince JS developers to write their own tools in a standards-compliant dialect and use standardized APIs so that contributors can use the runtime they already have installed instead of being cajoled and browbeaten into installing NodeJS or Bun or Deno or whatever to do what the browser runtime is perfectly capable of: opening a project directory, executing the code comprising the build script, and outputting the build artifacts when it's done.

by cxr

5/24/2026 at 7:16:32 PM

This is why I use Clojure/ClojureScript to sidestep the issue entirely, while still being able to use the ecosystem if I have to.

by arikrahman