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file-system-access
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FileSystemAccessAPI, as implemented in browsers, I believe does not yet support block level access and locking. Both required to make this work, the developer behind Absurd SQL is working with the team designing the API to ensure it will have support. IndexedDB is the only way of doing this on browsers currently.
https://github.com/WICG/file-system-access/issues/323
If you need to use IndexedDB and you do not want to have to handle the absurdities of IndexedDB, give Dexie a try (https://dexie.org/). It really makes using IndexedDB a breeze.
This is great!
A few more exciting things are happening with file-systems in Chrome that will make this a lot better soon.
Firstly OPFS gives you a private sandboxed filesystem you can access with `await navigator.storage.getDirectory()` to avoid the permission prompt.
Secondly "Augmented OPFS" is coming to web workers, which will give you the ability to read/write partial files with `file.createSyncAccessHandle()`.
There's a demo of this working from the Chrome team here: https://github.com/rstz/emscripten-pthreadfs/tree/main/pthre...
And a more thorough write-up here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1SmfDdmLRDo6_FoJMl5w1DVum...
Yes, many are refusing to implement it due to security concerns. A notable one is Brave, which is based on Chromium, and yet refuses to enable it (https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/issues/11407).
I'm skeptical that reducing access to the FS actually protects users. Those that would be fooled by scams based on FileSystemAccess APIs would very likely be fooled also with other less intricate tectics. So I doubt that the overall security of users is in practice affected.
At least, browsers that refuse to implement the FileSystemAccess APIs could implement them, but leave them disabled by default, and require some non-trivial action to enable them. So users with a very basic understanding of how things work in the browser would not be able to enable them.