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Dell uses this exact technique on Windows to launch/interact with their driver installation tool from the web. That has decent UX because it comes pre-installed. But, generally, users aren't accustomed to this pattern and any user education requirement is often a non starter in many market segments.

It also has security implications if you are exposing OS functionality to websites. I remember Dell having a bad one a couple years ago.

There is also an antivirus browser extension that works in a similar way. It installs a native C++ executable that the extension interacts with. That has a huge security footprint. IIRC they rolled their own parser (HTML?, JSON?) and it went predictably bad.

There are lots of implications to consider. I'd like to see progressive web apps fill this niche on the desktop. They have various mechanisms for persistence of data and WASM will increase the practical use cases. Hopefully the APIs available to PWAs in the future will allow all sorts of new use cases.




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