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Comment by bsimpson | Hacker News Reader

The only browser to implement the File System API right now is Chrome, and it obfuscates the actual files it saves on your hard drive. I don't know that we yet have a browser-based API that lets you arbitrarily access the user's disk.

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> I don't know that we yet have a browser-based API that lets you arbitrarily access the user's disk.

I'd say that's a good thing.

Well, if there is a proper permission system to go with it I don't think that's a bad thing. We want web apps to become as powerful as desktop apps, don't we?

When it comes down to end users permission systems never work. Let's take Android as example. It allows you to view fine-grained permission list for each application which you are going to install -- that's good, right? For end users -- not so much. They click "OK" just to remove all this useless information and install their application right away.

I think it's true that the Android permission system is not very good; an application with zero permissions can read everything on the SD card. However, I'd like to think this is just a weakness in Android, rather than proof that permissioning system for end-users don't work.

Are there any other recent examples of poor permissioning?

Maybe the fact that programmers are typically more considerate about this, but it has no "real" benefit to end users, leads to the whole design/workflow not getting much attention.

The problem is that no matter what the app and what permissions it asks for, 99% of users will consent without thinking.

Unix never worked??

Permissions on Android suck because they aren't fine-grained enough. Maybe today I want an app to have this privilege but not tomorrow. Maybe I want this feature that requires this permission, but not that feature that requires that permission. Rather than a blanket EULA-style shrink wrap grant of permissions up front.

I hear what you're saying, but I'm afraid that if you follow that logic too far then you end up in an Apple iPhone-like walled garden.

In principle, you should be able to trivially turn this into a WinRT app. This way you could write to temp file storage for your app and render out of that. You could keep the codebase isolated for the cross-platform browser bits and have WinRT integration code as a separate project.

Yeah, Chrome only support is a bit limiting. I'd love to be able to do same with Firefox in the near future (1-2years). I do hope they implement that File API soon.

Firefox used to have their own API for such things. If I'm not mistaken it's still used in tiddlywiki [1] to persist changes on a local filesystem.

[1] http://www.tiddlywiki.com/

unless the files are in dropbox and you tunnel read/write access to them through dropbox API

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