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Comment by seagreen | Hacker News Reader

That's the glory of web browsers: 1-click sandboxed installation of programs on demand.

This is incredible!

> enough maturity to implement essentially an entire operating system / virtual machine AS the browser

Yes, an operating system-- but one without user-facing persistence! Only per-application, networked, silo'd persistence, where the user sees a rendered form of data but not the data itself.

IMHO these two facts, that

a) Web browsers are BETTER than Linux, Windows, etc as an OS in a very important way, package management

and

b) They're missing one of the primary features of an OS, persistence

overshadow any other facts about them. What a strange tool they are.

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I would temper your message with the caveat that the data is still accessible to the user; one click to open devtools, and another to switch to the "Storage" tab, and you have all your persisted data visible to the user.

You can copy and/or edit said data from that view as well!

Albeit the convention is clearly to not presume your browser app user will be interacting with their data at _all_ through the devtools, which I find regrettable but unavoidable with the current state of "computer literacy" and the state of "devtools-as-an-interface" (obviously the ergonomics aren't great for the average user today).

That's likely just a keyhole view into your data though.

Eg take web forums (not this one since there's weird lisp stuff down there and I don't know how it works, but the average web forum).

On the app (server) side they have access to everything, all of your posts in nice beautiful structured SQL.

On the user side you have access to none of that, just HTML soup and maybe some cached stuff in the "Storage" tab, or maybe not.

> Albeit the convention is clearly to not presume your browser app user will be interacting with their data at _all_ through the devtools, which I find regrettable but unavoidable with the current state of "computer literacy" and the state of "devtools-as-an-interface" (obviously the ergonomics aren't great for the average user today).

I really like your use of "convention" and "presume" here, because I think that's the essential lens to view these things through. It's absolutely possible for an app to provide all of a user's data in a nice structured form in IndexedDB, that will just be rare because it's not the convention.

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