Comment by Mars008
6 days ago
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
I have been evaluating and testing the Filesystem API for a local first web based CAD editor and having direct r/w access to the filesystem is a great way to make such a thing, couple with the FilesystemObserver[1] API this makes building proper editors on the web a breeze.
In place of this, Firefox recommends using the origin private file system (OPFS)[2] which is basically a sandboxed filesystem that the users cannot access. Though I agree from a security perspective it kind of makes sense (not particularly for my usecase), but it removes the ability for the user to have realtime changes on local files.
An example of this is using the web based tool as an intermediary step or a processing step in a bigger pipeline; I save it using my web tool and then native applications automatically handle file updates. This just creates an extra step for Firefox/Safari to replicate changes locally by having to manually update local files.
Also neither Firefox nor Safari support showDirectoryPicker() which also creates blocks for building a web based editor.
I love Firefox and I hope they can add support for this. I have stopped caring about Safari/Webkit completely because it's hellish to try and maintain feature parity while NOT sacrificing innovation and ease of use.
[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/FileSystemO...
[2] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/File_System...