Hacker News Reader

Comment by mg | Hacker News Reader

From my perspective, the biggest flaw in FireFox is that it does not support the File System Access API.

Because with it, we can offer users to hold their data natively on their devices. Instead of storing everything in the cloud.

Chrome on the desktop supports it. Here is a demo:

https://googlechromelabs.github.io/text-editor/

A text editor that works just like a native application.

And mobile support is also in the making:

https://issues.chromium.org/issues/40101963

I can't wait to use this in my web applications. Finally a way to build proper tools in the browser.

The "Origin private file system" that this story links to is just like the infamous IndexDB. Something that the user cannot backup, cannot use in other software and that is only kept around for as long as FireFox feels like.

View on HN

> kept around for as long as FireFox feels like

I've heard Firefox keeps OPFS data in browser as long as there's enough space (which can be checked from JS). It's been reliable from my experience, but backup is still necessary by saving to remote server or export as local file. Safari has a stricter strategy and removes OPFS data and local storage more aggressively, for example, if a site domain hasn't been visited in 7 days.

On the File System Access API, it seems doubtful that Mozilla will ever implement it in a useful way.

> Mozilla's Position

> There's a subset of this API we're quite enthusiastic about (in particular providing a read/write API for files and directories as alternative storage endpoint), but it is wrapped together with aspects for which we do not think meaningful end user consent is possible to obtain (in particular cross-site access to the end user's local file system). Overall we consider this harmful therefore, but Mozilla could be supportive of parts, provided this were segmented better.

https://mozilla.github.io/standards-positions/#native-file-s...

As I understand it, Safari won’t auto delete data stored by web apps that are launched from the home screen.

But, yeah, handling of this stuff should be better. I’d personally prefer it if the API’s required user opt in, and did not include auto deleting durably stored data.

The restrictions as Mozilla has created them value security so highly that they won't allow webapps to access users files (for fear that maybe the user allows multiple sites access to data that sites side-channel through).

Just one idiots opinion here, but that seems like an incredibly bone headed way to take the whole project of the web platform & make sure it remains utterly unusable at replacing far less secure regular apps. And consigning the web to forever be dependant on cloud data systems, since there's no local access.

I really wish there were more than three parties, wish there was more than Google and Google alone that actually wanted the web platform to succeed. I'd kept some reservation that maybe Mozilla was being cautious, but after seizing the opportunity to grand-stand with Apple against a lot of pretty boring nice APIs that are fine behind permissions prompts in 2020, it feels like the have kept such a strong will to limit and restrain the web. https://www.zdnet.com/article/apple-declined-to-implement-16...

I agree, Mozilla and Apple are holding back the web with their approach to developing new browser features.

> Technologies that Apple declined to include in Safari: Bluetooth, MIDI, USB, serial interfaces like microcontrollers, 3D printers..

All these could be available by opt-in user permissions, but instead it's Apple's decision to not provide them at all.

They claim it's for security but it sure smells like a business decision.

Agreed - the picker APIs are essential. Chrome Developers did a blog about how we use it in Construct, our browser-based game development software: https://developer.chrome.com/blog/how-construct3-uses-the-fi...

As it says - 65% of users save to local files. It's what people want.

Browsers have existing file APIs that programmers could use but don't. To reiterate a comment from the last time this came up:

> You could literally run the Golang compiler in your browser if you wanted to[...] A lot of the stuff that people think they need Chrome's proposed filesystem APIs for are not actually things they need.

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41176674>

Ok but that outlines a miserable user experience.

Can't imagine a worse alternative. The filesystem api is really good. For example, I use the google office suite entirely offline through the official extension that uses the filesystem api. You can edit a local file just like that.

Same goes for photopea.

You can't seriously suggest manual save as an alternative. Ctrl+S, choose file, do you want to overwrite, yes. That's way too much friction, come on.

Literally no one wants to work like this. A save dialog every time I press cmd-s? If we shipped local file editing for Notion that worked like this our users would egg our office. For any app outside maybe like an image macro meme generator this sucks. For anything else like for example a notes app, photo library, more serious image editor, PowerPoint, video editor, animation software, anything people spend >1 hour a day in - you want to auto save, and often you want to manage a tree of files in a root folder as a “library” of the users’ data.

Electron only exists because browsers are too limited. That’s all electron is anyways, a browser with much better APIs for writing apps then the ones included in Chrome and especially Firefox.

Geez, you fucking people...

An API is not by definition fine-grained control over UI/UX.

Browser makers can implement the new file system API with better UX than what they have now. They can also do that with the existing file APIs; there's no contract involving the existing APIs that says things have to work the way they do right now. (They could also implement the new APIs in a way that technically works but has just as shitty or worse UX than the existing ones.)

If you want good/better UX for file save operations, then lobby for that. A whole new (sprawling, bad) set of APIs for giving websites access to the user's filesystem is an orthogonal matter. You're conflating two separate things.

I do not want better UX to read and write a single file. None of the example apps I mentioned work well with R/W to a single file except maybe the image editor example.

I want permission to create, read, write, move/rename files and directories within a root directory selected by the user. Anything less is not sufficient for AAA quality local-first apps.

I think window.showDirectoryPicker() is fine. I hope Firefox will implement this or a similar API, but I am also okay with launching major features without Firefox support. I have done so before to no discernable adverse effects.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Window/show...

Nothing I just said is limited to the narrow use case of dealing with single files. If you want improvements for multiple files, then congratulations, you can have that, too!

> I want permission to [...] move/rename files [...] Anything less is not sufficient for AAA quality local-first apps.

And robbers want to be able to slip their fingers into the wallets of whomever they want. So?

Very few apps outside of file managers actually need to be able to move and rename the user's files, and it would be much better if they those that don't would assume they aren't going to be able to. You can call this a prereq for high-quality apps, and I'll maintain my view that apps that refuse to work unless you grant an overbroad set of capabilities that they don't really need are ipso facto low-quality.

Besides, if you actually want all this, then you can build an app for remoteStorage.io right now, without needing to know whether the files live on the user's disk or not—and if the user wants the storage area they connect to your app to to be backed by local files, then that's a choice that they can make. Your app doesn't need to be able to discriminate between whether they are or they aren't.

Why are you comparing renaming a file inside a directory picked or created by the user to robbers picking a pocket? It's quite typical to implement "atomic writes" by writing to a temporary adjacent file, and once the write is complete, move it to the actual destination filename, possibly overwriting the existing file. For example when exporting a video in a video editor, you might write it first to "$APPDIR/Trip to Spain.webm.incomplete" and then move it to "$APPDIR/Trip to Span.webm" once the file is valid.

I am fine if Firefox or any other user-agent mandates that the user can only grant write access to empty directories in order to protect their users from robbers. I'd still be able to build and organize a library of the user's data there, and they'd still be able to edit files with other native apps without needed to upload or download anything.

I think the remotestorage.io suggestion a little odd, since the only way it seems one can expose a local filesystem to remotestorage.io apps would be to ask my users to download, install, run, and secure a native, non-web HTTP server program, or to sign up for a third party hosting provider where the files will be off in a cloud. That does not sound like a "local first" app to me :(

I find it ironic that a protocol called "remotestorage" touts that it is offline-first design because it keeps user data in inaccessible user-agent storage until the user goes back online, at which point it writes that data to a remote storage provider. Only once the file is written to a 3rd-party server can the user can download the file back to their filesystem. Wouldn't writing a file to the user's filesystem be a more convenient and simple system?

> Why are you comparing renaming a file inside a directory picked or created by the user to robbers picking a pocket?

I didn't.

Bye.

Call me old-fashioned, but I don't want browsers to alter the files I've downloaded after I downloaded them. Chrome gives absolutely no indication that it can still access the files I've "saved".

> Chrome gives absolutely no indication ...

https://imgur.com/a/XOLvosa

And this is after a prompt to give access, of course.

Seems that Mozilla is detached from reality, not only because of this, but they also refuse to implement other APIs like WebUSB providing bizarre claims about security at the same time neglecting valid arguments about web apis being safer than native apps..

Why even bother to sandbox the browser if it can scribble all over my USB devices?

it can't, you have to pick which device it can use.

I don't remember Windows or Linux providing this kind of security granularity. Or a security prompt such as the one you describe. USB is all-or-nothing.

chrome does.

https://miro.medium.com/v2/resize:fit:720/format:webp/0*7Oo4...

No, it's the browser that mediates the access from the websites.

Okay, and what makes sure the browser isn't stepping outside the granted access?

The bounty you'd get if you found a way to bypass this.

the same thing that makes sure the browser doesn't give them full access to your files. nothing.

Exactly.

I don't trust the browser to not report home the list of what I have connected on USB. That information is very valuable for ad companies. I don't want to see popups with "Your external HDD is too old. You may loose data. Buy a new one before it's too late!!!"

PWAs

Reply on news.ycombinator.com