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Comment by utopiah | Hacker News Reader

Wrong title, if it's "File System Access API (still Chrome-only as far as I can tell)" then it should read "A browser is the sandbox".

At the risk of sounding obvious :

- Chrome (and Chromium) is a product made and driven by one of the largest advertising company (Alphabet, formally Google) as a strategical tool for its business model

- Chrome is one browser among many, it is not a de facto "standard" just because it is very popular. The fact that there are a LOT of people unable to use it (iOS users) even if they wanted to proves the point.

It's quite important not to amalgamate some experimental features put in place by some vendors (yes, even the most popular ones) as "the browser".

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I stand by a policy that if a feature in one of my projects can only be implemented in Chrome, it's better not to add the feature at all; the same is true for features which would be exclusive to Firefox. Giving users of a specific browser a superior experience encourages a dangerous browser monoculture.

Firefox is only a few percent market share. You are hiring your users for not improving their user experience because it's not compatible with one of the a web browsers on a few percent of people's computers.

Chrome add these features because they are responding to the demands of web developers. It's not web developers fault if firefox can't or refuses to provide apis that are being asked for.

Mozilla could ask Claude to implement the filesystem api today and ship it to everyone tomorrow if they wanted to. They are holding their own browser back, don't let them also hold your website back. In regards to browser monoculture there are many browsers built on top of the open source Blink that are not controlled by Google such as Edge, Brave, and Opera just to name a few of the many.

I say the following as a firefox+ubo user:

There are many useful things that can only be implemented for Chromium: things like the filesystem API mentioned in this post, the USB devices API used to implement various microcontroller flashing tools, etc. Users can have multiple browsers installed, and I often use Chromium as essentially a sandboxed program runtime.

SOME users can have multiple browsers installed. Some can absolutely not. In fact, 1.6 billion users can only have one installed and it's not Chrome or Chromium based.

Assuming you're talking about iOS: and their OS won't let them install your app to manage files or flash microcontrollers anyway. It's not your problem when they choose an actively hostile platform.

Not writing the feature makes sense, but pushing Firefox and Safari to add support would be pro-social if you're up for it. The most common reason for browsers not to add support is something like "this can be done in other ways, and it has maintainability/security/bloat downsides". Running into a feature you can't build is evidence on the "this can be done in other ways" question (but of course the other downsides could still be big enough that it's not worth doing).

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