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Comment by lima | Hacker News Reader

It sure is. This is why Chrome apps and progressive web apps are great - they share the Chrome runtime and inherit its hardening, security properties and updates.

Many Electron apps should just be a PWA instead, and many actually are. Why would I want to install a desktop app for WhatsApp? It runs just fine in Chrome, and using More Tools -> Create shortcut..., you can even create a launcher entry that will launch the page in its own window.

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Because of inability of PWA to write local files at desired locations (you can at best download a file), PWA's usefulness is limited as a desktop app replacement technology. The moment you allow rw local file access you are off to a security-fun-land.

Right, but this is a small minority of applications.

I strongly strongly disagree!

The vast majority of the work I do can be done off-line with files stored on disk, minus stuff that obviously needs connectivity (e.g. Slack). Writing text, writing code, reading/editing documents and spreadsheets, doing CAD (mechanical and electronics), etc. During the week I live in the city, but on weekends and occasionally for longer stretches of time I like to head out to our rural house for peace and quiet (and focused work). Over time, the number of applications that ought to work off-line has been slowly shrinking, whether it's because they insist on using cloud storage instead of local storage, or licensing checks, or whatever. It's really really disappointing, and I would personally be delighted if I could get work done without an Internet connection.

You can design a PWA that works offline with local files on disk already, by using the browser's file select dialogs. It's not necessary to give the app arbitrary access to the whole filesystem to get that functionality, which is what the parent is asking for.

I'm genuinely not all that familiar with what PWAs can and can't do... Would a, for example, Word-like PWA be able to both load and save files to disk?

Just like any web app, it would be able to read specific files of a user's choosing using an HTML "file" input, and it would be able to save files by initiating a download. The app would not be able to provide its own UI for selecting the file to open/save but rather it would have to rely on the browser's UI for doing those things.

As an example, if I were using a PWA-based schematic editor, I couldn't just hit Cmd-S and save it back to disk without having to choose the download location etc every time?

You would have to do that, unless you are willing to only save the data in the app's storage itself while you're working on it. Similar to the model typically used with mobile apps, for example.

On my Chromebook, I use editor "Caret" which can save back to the original file location (e.g., SD card).

Chrome has a proprietary extension for that. Firefox won't be able to do the same.

No, you can't. You can open local files but not save them to desired locations, only download them as usual browser files. There are polyfills that mostly don't work; each browser has a different broken API for local file access and methods are often deprecated/removed.

Your browser provides its own UI for choosing the location to save downloaded files. This might not be ideal if you want to build your own file manager view into your app, but I don't think it's fair to say that your app is less capable just because it doesn't have that.

An example - you are using some web IDE (imagine a self-hosted version of VSCode). You have a few local files open in your browser, editing the code. Now you want to save them - you'd have to "redownload" them to save them. That's a highly suboptimal UX.

If you are actively working on the files, then you could just save them to the app's local storage. There is not necessarily a need to save them back to the same place you imported them from. When you are ready to export the project then you could have the app generate a zip file, or just push it directly to git or another app and skip the filesystem altogether.

Obviously this is not a great workflow for certain things like system administration tools that are specifically designed to work with the local machine's filesystem, but that's not really a good use case for PWAs in the first place.

Local storage is obviously not an option - imagine your project has a few gigabytes. Coding example was just to illustrate the problem quickly for everybody to understand what the issue is.

Forcing user to generate/download ZIP at some well-defined points in time is a horrible UX idea; in addition it leads to desynced content of files and local storage. Browser's local storage can also disappear if SQLite gets corrupted, making it a nice SPOF for all PWAs that are installed. Imagine not losing data just for one app, but for all of them.

I beg to disagree :-)

I’ve worked on the Native File System API on Chrome.

It’s available through Origin Trial at the moment.

That said, Web apps can currently emulate reading files and writing to disk.

Take a look at this library, which also works as a poly fill:

https://github.com/tomayac/browser-nativefs

IIRC there was a feud between Chrome developers who wanted raw file access and Firefox ones who didn't want it. W3C sided with FF, so we can't build proper desktop apps using PWA, even if WASM makes them quite fast these days. Now Chrome devs resuscitated the attempt with NFS API, so I'll grab my popcorn and watch their interaction one more time...

W3C or WHATWG?

https://github.com/w3c/filesystem-api/issues/8

️ Note that this repo has now been moved to https://github.com/GoogleChromeLabs/browser-nativefs.

How do I build installer for Chrome PWA? Like if user does not have Chrome, it should install it. Also i don't want to bother user with that implicitly installed chrome, so it should not add shortcuts, etc and just live as an app launcher.

Don't bundle Chrome, just let the user use whatever browser they prefer. AFAIK Edge also supports PWAs, but not Firefox Desktop yet.

Turns out a PWA works in Firefox too [1] so I'm not sure it's entirely necessary to force a user to install a browser just for your app. Edge is/will be chromium, so I guess Safari is the only major browser to worry about?

[1] https://blog.mozilla.org/firefox/progressive-web-apps-whats-...

IMO you shouldn't have to make an installer, it should be the browser's job to expose the feature and integrate itself to the OS as natively as possible.

Because my Chrome already takes 6GB of memory and thus needs to be restarted once in a while. If those forces me to close apps I want to continue using then that will annoy me.

This needs to be distributable by the website... also with caching guarantees, desktop capture support (which I think is there now, but wasn't till just recently) etc.

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