It's hard for me to picture it being useful for normal people because configuring serial devices is a mess.
On Windows you need to know what COM port the device is mounted as. The default options for a USB serial device are absolutely awful if you are using a small-packet protocol (like a version of HLDC I developed which is appropriate to very small memory devices) Latency eats you alive.
For an "intranet" application it's different... I could see making a web POS application that connects to a USB serial barcode reader for instance.
> I could see making a web POS application that connects to a USB serial barcode reader for instance.
In the quest for increasingly worse applications? The browser should get as little information as possible about its environment. People will grant whatever permission it asks. The W3C's primary goal should be safe browser usage, not "supply Google with more data."
