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Comment by mog_dev | Hacker News Reader

Firefox not supported?

There was another Show HN recently (today?) that explained this. The JS feature to access local file system is currently not available in FF.

https://caniuse.com/native-filesystem-api

I understand, but why does it need filesystem access in the first place?

so you can upload (er, provide access to) an image of a PCB you are looking to trace

Edit: I should have used a different word than upload. It's just old habit. According to TFA, there is no uploading. All processing is done in the browser, so the app needs local file system access to get at your image

But I can drag and drop (or use the file picker) just fine on other websites.

To do what with? Upload? That's totally not the same thing as providing access for directly manipulating the file. That's basically HTML1.0 type stuff. JS file system access to provide a file to, I'm assuming, a WASM app is not even the same sport to be in the same ballpark.

Access for directly manipulating the file isn't necessary (perhaps if the files were enormous, but images and Gerber files aren't). One can upload/download files from a local web app just fine on firefox, and the WASM app can act on the file in memory with whatever APIs it wants.

> in memory

This, but it can also have the browser store it to disk by requesting the persistent mode from the storage API.

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

You are wrong. You can upload a file to a local web page for example, see this offline only image editing tool I made: https://lelandbatey.github.io/scrapbook_img_print_layout/

There are other ways for webpages to get file uploads than this particular JS API. I upload files via firefox every single business day as part of my job.

This JS feature doesn't upload the file to a server. This particular app says right there on the page that it does the magic in the browser.

You appear to be misunderstanding on how browsers handle file uploads. You cannot get the local file path for a file. There is no C:\ or /Volumes or whatever your OS uses. Browsers deliberately mask that from the upload.

You can 'upload' a file into a completely local web app just fine. The directory access is only necessary if you need the web app to be able to spontaneously write back to the original file on your machine, or if you want to read a whole directory tree, which might be slightly convenient for things like gerbers but can easily be dealt with in other ways (especially with gerbers, which you can distinguish by filename, something that the web browser does expose to javascript).

(and I do think it's kind of irritating that Mozilla is fighting against such useful features on somewhat patronising 'the users won't understand what permission they're granting' grounds)

PCB Tracer reads and writes over a dozen different file types — including images, schematics, datasheets, netlists, and revision history. It also provides an AutoSave feature, to prevent losing your work. Every file is saved to your project directory during a session. Doing all of this without constant interruptions to get user permissions requires the File System Access API, which is not yet available in all browsers. The Firefox developers have explicitly stated that this API will not be supported.

The File System Access API has security precautions built-in. For example, it requires users to explicitly grant permission to access a specific directory (once) per session. Also, the API never allows access to root or to system-related directories.

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