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Comment by geofft | Hacker News Reader

A few things that aren't mentioned:

- Web MIDI - access digital keyboards/synthesizers. I believe in some browsers there's no prompt, unlike Web USB.

- Screen sharing via getDisplayMedia, analogous to getUserMedia for cameras.

- WebRTC, peer-to-peer connections.

- Security keys (WebAuthn), specific support for cheap ($10-$50 depending on features) devices that do second-factor login to websites. Importantly, these devices communicate with the browser about which site you're logging into, making for phishing-proof logins.

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Web MIDI is really cool. I recently bought a new MIDI keyboard controller from Novation and was really impressed when I learned that the configuration tool can run entirely in the browser without requiring local installation. In Chrome, it displays a permission prompt.

Is WebRTC really peer-to-peer if you need a server?

The server is for convenience.

If you can handle signaling in another way, you're free to do so.

When I played around with WebRTC the first time, I did it by copying the signaling data via TextAreas and WhatsApp.

As another commenter points out you can signal however you like, but even if a signaling server was required, it'd still be peer to peer since peer to peer accurately describes how the packets are routed over the network.

A while back I wrote a screen sharer that uses WebRTC and Gun.js for signaling [0]. Nowadays you could use IPFS's JS lib to do this (or webtorrent even). Now if both people are behind a restrictive NAT or something, you do need a TURN server.

0 - https://myscreen.live

I wish the FUD about UPnP would finally calm down so we can finally have at least some P2P connections without the need for a rendezvous sever.

> A few things that aren't mentioned:

Those and all other things listed on linked article are JavaScript-lang/engine things NOT related to browser itself. You could use such using Electron, literally "outside of browser"

Try disable JS in your browser OR try to use Links[0] browser — and lets see what you can do with a browser in 2020.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Links_(web_browser)

The article is about things you can do with a browser, not things you can do with a browser with JS disabled. I think it's accurate. Also, all these features require support from parts of the browser beyond the JS implementation. Also, Electron embeds a web browser. Also, the ability to do things with something other than a browser doesn't imply you can't do them with a browser.

This is like replying to "Places you can visit for a road trip" and saying "You can visit all these places by train, too, also let's see you go there in a car without the engine."

(I am a links user, btw.)

Electron embeds a HTML-render + JS-engine != web browser

Electron is essentially just a version of chrome. If electron can do it, chrome can do it, and there is no way to say that chrome is not a browser.

Electron is essentially just a version of Chromium, NOT Chrome.

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