This does already (sort of) exist in a couple of projects: * Chromebots - http://www.iceddev.com/blog/chromebots-lowering-the-barrier-to-entry/ http://www.iced

This does already (sort of) exist in a couple of projects: * Chromebots - http://www.iceddev.com/blog/chromebots-lowering-the-barrier-to-entry/ http://www.iceddev.com/blog/chromebots-lowering-the-barrier-... (for controlling arduino via JS using browser-serialport https://github.com/garrows/browser-serialport https://github.com/garrows/browser-serialport as a chrome packaged app (so requires a little more than just 'visit a website, root a /dev' * Nodebots - http://nodebots.io/ http://nodebots.io/ for controlling a multitude of hardware via node.JS through bluetooth, BLE, or USB/Serial (which most hacker level hardware still prefers). * WhatWG WebSerial - https://whatwg.github.io/serial/ https://whatwg.github.io/serial/ which is doing similar to this, but less from one specific vendor Ideally the world would converge to a single unified implementation, that said there is a lot of differences between USB-serialport, USB-HID, and a multitude of other communication methods over USB. TL;DR you can do hardware with JS already, this should make things in the browsers slightly easier (one less dependency) at the risk of making it available for all things. Sum: Tradeoff, like all the things.