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Comment by joeblau | Hacker News Reader

I don’t even play games but I wouldn’t expect a web game to store all of its metadata in my local storage. I would expect it to store data on their own severs and only store active gameplay information locally.

My browser storage is not a game developers long term storage, its a cache.

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It's not about metadata or "web games". It's about apps/games that can be used offline. For that to work, all the data needs to be stored client-side.

> My browser storage is not a game developers long term storage, its a cache.

IndexedDB is explicitly not a cache, it's long-term data storage for significant amounts of data.

Cookies can be used for storage for up to a year, but it’s commonly accepted that browsers vary in implementation of this based on user settings. So why wouldn’t user settings exist for other kinds of permanent or session storage? Google Chrome is so dominant in both browser-making and standards-making that we’ve forgotten the browser — and user — is always king when it comes to the web. If users want permanent storage they will use alternative browsers for those particular sites. And while site authors can block Safari with a prompt, it’s then up to users to change browsers. Presumably for developers these will have knobs to tweak so local storage can continue working in alternative browsers on iOS the way it always has. Presumably Safari will eventually get a config toggle for this setting if it isn’t already there. Users already don’t notice when browser history is cleared, though advanced users will configure this by following instructions on Google. Same here.

> Google Chrome is so dominant in both browser-making and standards-making that we’ve forgotten the browser — and user — is always king when it comes to the web. If users want permanent storage they will use alternative browsers for those particular sites.

No, they generally won't. There also aren't really any "alternative browsers" on iOS, they're all Webkit-based.

> So why wouldn’t user settings exist for other kinds of permanent or session storage?

Nobody is saying there shouldn't be any settings or consent in this regard. What we get here is not a setting, we get one major player deciding that there will be no way to properly implement offline web apps on their platform.

I disagree that there’s no way to implement an alternative to Safari, besides Chrome there’s also iCab and other browsers that show not only a completely different UI but also innovative new features. Even if WebKit makes it impossible to remove this restriction, a third-party browser could find a way to intercept calls and keep its own local storage, read and backup native local storage, or provide other means to local storage via proprietary JS APIs, and if that browser is Chrome, it will gain traction. Especially if Apple changes iOS to allow users to change default apps.

Why? Are you paying for it? To you, it's trivial amount of data that you can wipe if you somehow desperately need the 1mb, to them it quickly adds up to significant costs.

I find this position absurd, just like the suggestion that everyone should start programming complicated user hostile save flows.

Yes, it's their device, they literally are paying for it. What kind of question is that.

He was asking about paying for the game.

The above comment was talking about persisting save files to someone else's servers.

The article as well as my concern here is not about the browser proper but web apps like you install onto your phone and one of the major points of is that they work offline despite t

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