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Comment by gen220 | Hacker News Reader

By doing all of the computation of user data clientside, and making all of the persistence in localstorage.

It’s very doable, especially with small data.

Unfortunately, you have to take projects’ words that they do this on good faith as an end user. You’d need to GET the app bundle, and then firewall the tab / disable your network interface to be certain that no data is leaking out. It’s not so easy to control this as an end user these days, and web apps can be quite sneaky.

Maybe we’ll see some innovation in this space from browsers in the future, where an app can identify itself as local only and then be sandboxed by the browser.

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> Maybe we’ll see some innovation in this space from browsers in the future, where an app can identify itself as local only and then be sandboxed by the browser.

That would be a really cool 'HTML5' API — let the page do:

  document.addEventListener('DOMContentLoaded', () => {
    // some bootstrap
    document.goOffline();
  });

Which could prompt the user — "this web page wants to disable its own internet access. Do you want to continue? (Refresh the page to reload from server)[OK/Cancel]" — and then it can do longer use the internet & has its own storage which gets wiped before it's allowed back online.

Would allow all the benefits to devs of doing things in the browser (if that's their choice), & end-users could trust that it was truly offline.

Probably this will end up like all the apps which ask for all kind of permissions they really don't need

I Agree very much with the general idea. One addition, though:

> Unfortunately, you have to take projects’ words that they do this on good faith as an end user

The same is true for applications running natively. Of course, those can be firewalled from any outgoing and incoming network traffic more easily. And they don’t feel like and don’t default to using a network connection all the time. But still, they could.

It might just be easier to partner with a respected company or companies that people trust with their money/data already. The biggest one that comes to mind that also seems a bit behind on the visualizations and sleek UI that this has would be Vanguard.

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