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Dropbox and Github both use it to talk to their installed desktop clients from the website. It's very useful as it by just installing an app, a website can get
by pilif 10y ago
Dropbox and Github both use it to talk to their installed desktop clients from the website. It's very useful as it by just installing an app, a website can get more access to the local machine's hardware without having to resort to browser-specific plugins.
In our case, we're using it to read data from a barcode scanner to use it on a web application. All a user needs to do is to install the application an once that's done it works in all browsers.
- flukus 10y agoCan any websites talk to these apps? I've built a similar one (a decade ago now), but we at least had the benefit of only running on a closed network.
- pilif 10y agoPotentially, yes. In our case we're doing a bit of additional work to prevent this from happening though. Other sites would get access to the built-in web server, but they wouldn't get anything apart from a 403 error.
- imagist 10y ago> Dropbox and Github both use it to talk to their installed desktop clients from the website. It's very useful as it by just installing an app, a website can get more access to the local machine's hardware without having to resort to browser-specific plugins. Okay, but from a user's perspective this is exactly what I would NOT want--it's unintuitive to me that going onto GitHub would give them access to my machine's hardware just because I have the app installed. The program should serve the user, not GitHub or DropBox.