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Comment by mg | Hacker News Reader

Let's hope Firefox starts to support the File System Access API soon.

For me, it is the last missing piece to make web apps as comfortable as native apps.

I use a lot of web apps I fine-tuned exactly to my liking. I do all my writing in this web app for example: https://www.gibney.org/writer - I hit F11 and boom! I am in distraction free writing heaven :)

If Firefox would support the File System Access API, it would be much more comfortable to load and save my writings.

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> Let's hope FireFox starts to support the File System Access API soon.

File System Access considered harmful, will not be implemented: https://mozilla.github.io/standards-positions/

Note: in true Google fashion Chrome team implemented and released at least three different APIs all having something to do with files.

Status of File System Access? "not a W3C Standard nor is it on the W3C Standards Track." https://wicg.github.io/file-system-access/ Shipped in Chrome, of course.

Mozilla opposes the picker methods of the File System Access API. They are fully behind the Origin Private File System part, and actually have the SQLite demo from the article running in Firefox Nightly.

> but Mozilla could be supportive of parts, provided this were segmented better.

They seem quite positive to parts of the spec. Don't know if that's the parts relevant here or not.

Yep, Chrome is the new IE. Only instead of ActiveX and small proprietary HTML additions and EEE, it's a full coup de tat on web standards and Embrace, Extend, Control.

Isn't Safari the new IE?

I think they are on phones mostly.

They are one and the same thing now, WebKit!

I can't tell if you're trying to say both Chrome and Safari use the same rendering engine, but Chrome hasn't used WebKit for nearly a decade.

You’re absolutely right! I wasn’t aware of Blink!

They are both the new IE but at different point in time

Chrome is the young IE, the one disregarding the competition and imposing their own standards.

Safari is the old IE, the one that is behind other browsers in terms of standard as but that you cannot ignore because it ha too big of a market share

So if people abandoned Chrome and Safari for Firefox, wouldn't Firefox be the new IE? I don't remember IE being open source and community-developed like Chromium which Chrome is based off of. I use Chromium on Linux and while there are a few things to complain about, it has been a pretty positive experience overall and worked better than Firefox.

Chromium is open source but is not community-developed.

A great article on this, Breaking the Web Forward https://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/2021/08/breaking_th...

> coup de tat

Coup d'état: French, "stroke (coup) over/of the State (état)".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coup_d%27%C3%A9tat

/pedantry

What Mozilla/Firefox needs to understand is that end users do not care about standards purity/principles. If core functionality doesn't work in your browser, people simply aren't going to use it. This is why the web is increasingly broken on Firefox--nowadays, about 10% of the sites I visit are simply utterly broken or slow on Firefox but work fine on Chrome.

Hell, even the $LARGE_CORPORATION I work at has all its developer tooling (including documentation, custom extensions, etc.) on Chrome. I've reported countless Firefox-specific issues, often due to missing API support, because no one internally tests on anything other than Chrome. You have to meet your users where they are.

I agree. I'm developing a system which uses webapp to interact with device over USB. It works in Chrome. It's sad for me to not support Firefox but the only way is to ask user to run some binary which will open websocket on localhost to interact with USB device. This is strictly worse from security PoV. This is strictly worse from usability PoV (user have to download and install manually additional component). This introduces update hurdles (I need to develop reliable updater). So much friction and issues just because of purity stand which hurts user in the end.

> I'm developing a system which uses webapp to interact with device over USB. It works in Chrome. It's sad for me to not support Firefox

As a cautionary tale: the moment Firefox shipped support for a hardware API they immediately ran into sites abusing them. Of course, Chrome doesn't even hide them behind a user prompt. https://twitter.com/denschub/status/1582730985778556931 (and comment)

There are reasons Firefox opposes these standards. Chrome is neither your friend nor does it care for the web. Why are you so willing to give a carte blanche to a power struggle (Chrome/Web vs. Android) inside a web advertising company is beyond me.

I don't know about MIDI but accessing USB requires user confirmation and you can only access a selected port.

That's why th ecautionary tale: which of the capabilities of those APIs whould be behind user consent and which shouldn't? At which point will the user just click "yes" without reading those consent pop ups?

> If core functionality doesn't work

Somehow "everything that Chrome ships" is core functionality now

> broken or slow on Firefox but work fine on Chrome.

Somehow you blame Firefox for this. Even though "only works in IE" isn't even ancient history

But at the same time if it's not for purity/principles why would anyone choose Firefox over Chrome?

Single issue user. Adblocking. Not because of some grand belief in the idea that Mozilla would be a better steward for the web like what many others here are advocating.

These are the same sort of arguments that surrounded ActiveX and IE, back in the day. When $LARGE_CORPORATION is stuck on Chrome years after they would like to be (and other fallout), it will have been entirely predictable. Good on you for continuing to report issues you see to FF, but to your final point, if everyone is going to a bad place, no, you do not have to go.

> What Mozilla/Firefox needs to understand is that end users do not care about standards purity/principles. If core functionality doesn't work in your browser, people simply aren't going to use it. This is why the web is increasingly broken on Firefox--nowadays, about 10% of the sites I visit are simply utterly broken or slow on Firefox but work fine on Chrome.

It's not broken because they are fussy on standards.

it's broken because their marketshare dropped so low companies that make money on developing web stuff are often not contractually obliged to even support it. Few of our clients have contracts where we're obliged to support any browser above 5% market share and FF is already below even that!

> What Mozilla/Firefox needs to understand is that end users do not care about standards purity/principles.

They might when their files get exfiltrated or encrypted. The file system access API UX is far too easily abused to misleading users into granting access to things they didn’t intend.

You're looking for https://fs.spec.whatwg.org/

https://mozilla.github.io/standards-positions/ is positive on it

and implementation is well underway: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1748667

> https://mozilla.github.io/standards-positions/ is positive on it

To hopefully add a bit of clarity: indeed, that page has OPFS flagged as positive under the label "File System." Further down the page is a "File System Access" entry which is flagged negative.

You're wrong for the API discussed in GP.

That's why I wrote this: "in true Google fashion Chrome team implemented and released at least three different APIs all having something to do with files." :)

I didn't want to dig through all of them on mobile when I was responding.

Both Safari and Mozilla are open (and implement/have implemented) to Origin Private File System. Because it gives web sites an access to a file system without a chance of escaping and damaging user data. Can't remember which spec introduced it, and it doesn't really matter at this point.

For the more general part of File System Access Mozilla's and Safari's positions are: nope. https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/issues/154

There was also Storage Foundation API but it was thankfully never shipped (it was like a third way of handling files or something),and also received negative responses: https://chromestatus.com/feature/5670244905385984

Genuinely curious, why do you use that web app over whichever bare-bones editor is available on your system?

Because the web app is exactly the experience I want to have while writing:

Nothing on my screen except two areas: The writing area and the margin around it.

I want to be able to easily resize the writing area the way I can resize the textarea.

I want to be able to easily change the font size via ctrl+ and ctrl-.

I get that with vim and suckless terminal... Why do you need a browser for that?

Not everybody wants to use a terminal

does it have spellcheck? text-to-speech so you can have it read back to you? A browser window would have those things (on a mac, and I assume there's equivalents in windows)

Funny, Firefox on Mac sure doesn't integrate with the native text to speech, or offer it's own without plugins as far as I can tell. Gee it's almost like all browsers aren't exactly the same

And yes, of course Vim has spellcheck.

I have never seen a terminal solution that allows to have the terminal in fullscreen mode and still have a way to have a user defined writing area which can be resized on the fly.

I have experimented with various distraction free vim plugins but they were all fragile and cumbersome.

If you have a solution, a screenshot would be very interesting.

tmux would be worth checking out. If you’re happy with the browser though then that works too!

I haven't maintained a Vim config in a few years now (more of an Emacs man now), but I do remember using Goyo in college. Looking back at it, I think it might scratch your itch as far as Vim plugins go, it even allows you to resize the area on the fly.

https://github.com/junegunn/goyo.vim

Goyo is one of the plugins I experienced as brittle and cumbersome. IIRC it creates the centered text area by creating 9 windows. The outter 8 to center the one in the middle, which is used to edit the text.

In my attempts to use it, that created a bunch of issues.

> Nothing on my screen except two areas: The writing area and the margin around it.

what's wrong with the so called "zen mode" that has been available on every moderately popular editor for decades?

See also JRR Martin still using WordStar 4.0 for DOS

https://cdn.eteknix.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/37719_2_g...

https://www.thebookdesigner.com/7-distraction-free-writing-e...

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