Comment by mg
6 days ago
Now that Chromium supports the File System Access API on desktop and mobile, I am building every software I need as HTML+JS+CSS.
Before that, handling files in the browser was cumbersome. You had to offer download and upload links for users to manage files. And handling whole directories was impossible.
But now web apps are like native software tools that you can use to edit and manage files on the file system.
And the bonus point is that what you build this way is fully functional on mobile too. Right away, without any changes. At least on Android.
What about FireFox, does/will it support file system access? I'm not an expert, just thinking this way and don't like Chromium. The idea is to use light web server in application + browser with JS. This makes it easier and more convenient as it can naturally run remote, on microprocessor. Also LLMs are good at generating such UIs.
This is how I develop all the software that I don't work on professionally. I have a variety of small web servers with various capabilities that I use. The latest is Copy Party, which I learned about from HN a couple of weeks ago. My apps are then single files that know how to write modified copies of themselves back to the server. The server is dumb, it doesn't really know that it's anything other than just a file upload. I then use SyncThing to replicate that folder structure across all my devices so I have offline access by default.
Copyparty[0] is amazing. I've noticed copyparty+webdav is a lot faster for browsing my NAS than smb or nfs from macOS.
I've been meaning to build a gallery application (or simple web page) that can browse pictures from a copyparty instance and sort/organise them with an UI fit for my purpose.
Any pointers how I could make one that self-saves to copyparty?
[0] https://github.com/9001/copyparty/
https://caniuse.com/native-filesystem-api
Looks like Firefox does not support it currently.
It's even worse than that. If you click on the resources section, you can see that Mozilla considers the proposal harmful[1]. They say there's a subset of features that they may consider. Safari seems to be in the same boat, but I can't find an official standards position.
[1] https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/issues/154
2 replies →
+1 Another bonus is that it's properly sandboxed, you only give access to the files/directories and other resources it needs.
Except you lose native document UI features. Especially frustrating in Electron "apps".