Chrome permits access to ws://127.0.0.1 from https apps. I believe it's also making its way to Firefox, which is currently http only. Other browsers (ie/edge/safari) don't even follow this exception for http yet.
Interesting. My impression from the above bug was that they explicitly decided against keeping it open. If they reversed their position, that would be good news.
Could you give a link where this is discussed? I see crbug.com/378566 mentioned in another comment, but there doesn't seem to be a decision in there, apart from general acknowledgement that the use-case exists.
I was hoping for a roughly low barrier of entry, rather than try to figure out who will trade USB for ETH, as I have no BTC.
In all honesty, I'm looking at distributed applications as well, which from what I read Ethereum says it does and doesn't do. It's a bit fast and loose from what I read about, about Ethereum's capabilities.
I'll go back to my experimenting with TOR and how it might be possible to make your own distributed applications within the Hidden Services. That's free to use, and as low bar as I can think of. (Add machine, shows up as HS.)
While developing, you would do it either on the dev (local, not connected) or testnet. Both these are easily mineable (I have 10k's on both), so there is nothing stopping you to actually playing around and putting together a dapp without having real ETH in your pocket.
No expenses and you can play around all you like. When you want to go live, there is typically only a very small deployment cost.