The pain and anguish of using IndexedDB: problems, bugs and oddities

IndexedDB implementations in various browsers had their quirks, but by far the quirkiest (buggiest) was Safari. I remember working with their implementation for our web app about 3/4 years ago, and their implementation was so utterly unpredictable and unstable, that even their error messages didn't make any sense. It was as if they'd asked a blithering idiot to do their implementation for them, and didn't check any of the work.

Thankfully, I believe things are better now (i.e. they get the basics of storing data right at least), but looking at this gist, they've found alternative ways of irritating developers.

In the past, it was IE that used to bug the heck out of me, but now Safari has well and truly left IE in the dust in terms of its ability to annoy and dumbfound developers.

I wrote this 6 years ago, and it’s still relevant: https://max.io/articles/the-state-of-state-in-the-browser/

We need a real robust abstraction for the web that works like a file system. Everything else is just too opinionated and compromises in one way or another.

> Multiple tabs of an app using IndexedDB will invariably write to the same IndexedDb database. Without cross-tab locking, database corruption is hard to avoid.

I solved this a few years ago by generating a uuid in SessionStorage and using that as a composite key for tab isolation. Worked very well. That solution is still in production. The IndexedDB wrapper I used was Dexie. Not great for long-lived data, naturally, but we needed IndexedDB for speed, storage size and an async API.

I later used localForage and I found that to be extremely limiting in comparison (because of LocalStorage being the lowest common denominator). I would not recommend localForage for IndexedDB unless you do really, really, really simple stuff.

If anyone has any details about those QuotaExceededError firing when users have plenty of disk space and really not much data on the domain... I am working mostly with Chrome.

I'm very much over having to deal with IndexDB. Is there any viable alternative that doesn't require a huge dependency?

> Out of the major browsers, Chrome's IndexedDB implementation is the best.

But an earlier post said chrome was the slowest.

man thisis why im just sticking with localstorage these days. juat 5mb limit but totes safe

Does HN have a policy about correcting typos in submitted titles? “aguish” is indeed what the gist currently says, but I’d imagine that’ll be fixed at some point.