I'm old enough to remember people grumbling when audio and video elements were added. Useless crap in a browser! Just compile your own MP3 player if you want to listen to music on a website!

Same as WebUSB - heaven forbid that a website can become more useful by flashing firmware to a device!!

The web is a platform. It will grow and mature into something we can't possibly imagine. It's OK for browsers to try new things to see what sticks.

I assume that Mozilla have done some research showing people like typing emoji but don't know how to use their system emoji picker. Even in an ultra-purist world where a browser does nothing other than render HTML (death to JS!!!) surely people will want to type into boxen and POST text somewhere?

> Same as WebUSB - heaven forbid that a website can become more useful by flashing firmware to a device!!

Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize.[1]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Even before that, there were folk moaning that "Mosaic has ruined the web with its pesky IMG tag - images should be opened in a user-specified viewer app rather than inline!".

Similarly, there were people who complained about forms and buttons at roughly the same time and, a few years later, img maps, frames, layers (okay, with good reason), and CSS.

They (or their spiritual heirs) always pop up on Firefox threads, for some reason. For those people, I want to point out that Lynx is right here and is as usable as it's ever been: https://github.com/ThomasDickey/lynx-snapshots

> Same as WebUSB - heaven forbid that a website can become more useful by flashing firmware to a device!!

Useful for whom ? The CIA ?