I didn’t see any security features mentioned… am I the only one a wee bit terrified? Am I just paranoid?
And at the end of the day there's only so much you can do. The same kind of people that will click yes on any dialog will also click yes on "do you want to run this exe you just downloaded", and that'll get you file system access just fine too.
But from my understanding, the user grants access via this API on a directory based level when the website asks for access to one directory. If you have no concept of directories, or you put everything directly into one directory, it's tough to make this restriction useful. So in this instance, knowledge of hierarchical file systems is relevant, even if new operating systems make this knowledge increasingly obsolete.
It's the way nearly all computers, mobile or not, organize data. Some hide this fact to because they either think they know better than the user (Apple) or they want to make it really painful to not store all of your data in their backend (Google).
> But from my understanding, the user grants access via this API on a directory based level when the website asks for access to one directory. If you have no concept of directories, or you put everything directly into one directory, it's tough to make this restriction useful. So in this instance, knowledge of hierarchical file systems is relevant, even if new operating systems make this knowledge increasingly obsolete.
I think that illiteracy here has more to do with the advent of mobile OSes and people only exposed to mobile devices. Filesystem access isn't supported on mobile browsers at all so there isn't really a problem there (except for mobile Safari, which also doesn't expose folders to users, being on Apple's direct control).