standards-positions VS file-system-access

You can check why Mozilla and Apple have opted to not support this.

https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/issues/154

https://github.com/WebKit/standards-positions/issues/28

Neither Mozilla or Webkit are satisfied that the proposal is safe by default, and contains footguns for the user that can be pretty destructive.

FWIW Mozilla updated their position on Web Serial API to "neutral" and clarified that they might be okay with enabling the API with an add-on.

https://mozilla.github.io/standards-positions/#webserial

Allowing serial but not HID would be really strange. With HID you get standard identifiers that let you filter out devices that are too dangerous for the web. With serial you get nothing. Even if you know a device is dangerous, there's no way to protect users from it.

Hasn't FireFox been dragging their asses on @scope? https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/issues/472

It took years to just convince them of the need for it. And I'm not sure anyone got convinced vs Chrome had already shipped it and Safari has it planned so they caved in.

Hard to believe FireFox used to be a leader of the modern web.

As mentioned by others, OK idea, but not a fan that this isn't standardized. After a quick search+peruse, these seem to indicate that it's not around the corner either. Happy (/hope) to be corrected.

https://github.com/whatwg/html/issues/4180

https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/issues/990

Mozilla's position on these specs is nicely outlined publicly and transparently as part of their standards-positions project: https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/issues/100

I'm kinda glad it's not implemented in my browser, to be honest, because the whole thing seems like a security nightmare.

It's a shame it impacts some hobby usecases, but I don't think this outweighs the reasoning set out on the GitHub issue.

This should have big warnings on it. Some of these are not web standards; they are features implemented unilaterally by Google in Blink that have been explicitly rejected by both Mozilla and Apple on privacy and security grounds.

Take Web Bluetooth, for example:

Mozilla:

> This model is unsustainable and presents a significant risk to users and their devices.

— https://mozilla.github.io/standards-positions/#web-bluetooth

Apple:

> Here are some examples of features we have decided to not yet implement due to fingerprinting, security, and other concerns, and where we do not yet see a path to resolving those concerns

— https://webkit.org/tracking-prevention/

This is Microsoft’s Embrace, Extend, and Extinguish bullshit applied to the web platform by Google. Google keeps implementing these things despite all other major rendering engines rejecting them, convinces people that they are part of the web, resulting in sites like this, then people start asking why Firefox and Safari are “missing functionality”. These are not part of the web platform, they are Google APIs that have been explicitly rejected.

Is BLE a PWA requirement? I think they explained their position pretty well here, regardless of whether I agree:

https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/issues/95#iss...

I took a glance at Can I Use what the difference between the last public release of Firefox and Chrome is [1] and they don't really have that big of a difference in the eyes of normal use-cases? Some of these aren't implemented purely because of privacy reasons, the proposals aren't finished yet or complexity [2].

Why would Firefox need to change to Chromium engine? The only websites I notice that don't work with Firefox is because of user-agent targetting or just putting 5-second time-outs in Youtube code on non-chrome webbrowsers [3].

Can you give some examples of websites not working on Firefox?

[1] https://caniuse.com/?compare=chrome+120%2Cfirefox+121&compar...

[2] https://mozilla.github.io/standards-positions/

[3] https://www.neowin.net/news/youtube-seemingly-intentionally-...

Mozilla are dragging their heels on @scope:

https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/issues/472

https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/ideas/implement-css-scope-rul...

Someone who clearly didn't get it was wasting three years time "well actually"ing everything. The latest news is "it's worth prototyping". Meanwhile Chrome has released it(steam rolled?) and Safari has it in tech preview.

I question if FireFox has the resources to keep up with the pace of the modern web.

You can read about the privacy concerts the community group published [1].

[1]: https://wicg.github.io/file-system-access/#privacy-considera...

WHATWG File System Standard provides a means to write directories and files to the private origin storage associated with a Web page origin. If you want you can use WICG File System Access API to write data directly to your filesystem in the browser. WHATWG File System Standard uses the same FileSystemDirectoryHandle and FileSystemFileHandle defined by File System Access API.

Chromium-based browsers support File Systeam Access API.

We have stopped using the file system access API: https://github.com/WICG/file-system-access/issues/401

Where file handling is concerned, there are at least

- File System Access API, https://wicg.github.io/file-system-access/

- File Handling, https://github.com/WICG/file-handling/blob/master/explainer....

- Origin Private File System, https://github.com/WICG/file-system-access/blob/main/AccessH...

There was also Storage Foundation API to which the reaction was "I don't think it's an acceptable outcome for the web platform to have that many ways to work with files" :) https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/issues/481 This one never saw the light of day.

Huh. Disregard what I wrote entirely, then. Reading through https://github.com/WICG/file-system-access/blob/main/AccessH..., I can see how they’ve bypassed most of the problems I saw—I was making unnecessary assumptions.

Thank you for correcting me.

> Browsers have never let anything (not even JS) have raw access to the host FS

I'm not sure what you mean by "raw access", but the File System Access API certainly allows web applications to do a lot of things.

> The File System Access API (formerly known as Native File System API and prior to that it was called Writeable Files API) enables developers to build powerful web apps that interact with files on the user's local device, like IDEs, photo and video editors, text editors, and more.

https://web.dev/file-system-access/

> After a user grants a web app access, this API allows the app to read or save changes directly to files and folders on the user’s device. Beyond reading and writing files, this API provides the ability to open a directory and enumerate its contents. Additionally, web apps can use this API to store references to files and directories they’ve been given access to, allowing the web apps to later regain access to the same content without requiring the user to select the same file again.

> Additionally this API also makes it possible for websites to get access to some directory without having to first prompt the user for access.

https://wicg.github.io/file-system-access/

It's not just a draft, it's been part of Chrome since version 78 in 2019.

> After a user grants access, this API allows web apps to read or save changes directly to files and folders on the user's device. It does all this by invoking the platform's own open and save dialog boxes.

https://blog.chromium.org/2019/09/chrome-78-beta-new-houdini...

Discussion at the time:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21032537

In the post, the Vite webserver is only used to serve the HTML and JS static files to the browser. When the user saves or opens text files, the code uses the web File System Access API (https://wicg.github.io/file-system-access/) to interact with the user file system.

Have you heard of Project Fugu and their idea of a File System Access API in the browser? https://wicg.github.io/file-system-access/

I don't know a C++ equivalent of HTML , prompt(), or File System Access API (https://wicg.github.io/file-system-access/; https://web.dev/file-system-access/) using JavaScript in the browser window.