<story><title>Safari now supports File System Access API with private origin</title><url>https://webkit.org/blog/12257/the-file-system-access-api-with-origin-private-file-system/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>samwillis</author><text>This is brilliant! Being called a “file system access” api will confuse many people into thinking it’s about traditional file storage for “people” to use, like a file picker&amp;#x2F;save dialog. It’s not, this is about providing a block storage that can be used for other things.&lt;p&gt;The one I am most excited by is for persistent SQLite with proper acid transaction in the browser, not having to load the whole db into memory. Absurd SQL [0] currently does this by creating a VFS on top of IndexedDB. This would let it do it properly, and is likely to be upstreamed to SQL.JS which is the main SQLite WASM project.&lt;p&gt;0: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;github.com&amp;#x2F;jlongster&amp;#x2F;absurd-sql&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;github.com&amp;#x2F;jlongster&amp;#x2F;absurd-sql&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;Many new in browser DB engines are going to get built on top of this. Others that I could see happing are:&lt;p&gt;- Relm from MongoDB being ported to WASM and use this for storage.&lt;p&gt;- If I were Supabase I would be looking to create a “Mini Supabase” for mobile, and make it work in browser too.&lt;p&gt;- Couchbase Mobile as an alternative to PouchDB</text></comment>
<story><title>Safari now supports File System Access API with private origin</title><url>https://webkit.org/blog/12257/the-file-system-access-api-with-origin-private-file-system/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>mg</author><text>Unfortunately, this does not seem to be the &amp;quot;local file access&amp;quot; that Chromium offers and that Safari lacks.&lt;p&gt;With better browser support for the File System Access API, web applications that store their data in files might become a common thing.&lt;p&gt;Currently, when building a web application, you usually build some backend system that lets the user log in and then stores the data. Or you use IndexedDB and let the browser handle it. In both cases, the user does not have good access to the data.&lt;p&gt;If instead on the first run, the application asked the user &amp;quot;Where do you want to store the data&amp;quot; and the user selects a file or a directory, that puts the user in full control.&lt;p&gt;Then they later can backup the data however they like, edit it with other tools, version it etc etc.&lt;p&gt;The browser is an awesome platform. I love to write local tools in HTML. It is just so easy to tweak browser based applications to your needs. Open the html file, change a line or two, save - boom! you got what you want.</text></comment>