Comment by mg
12 hours ago
This is a great example of how useful the File System Access API is.
On http://co-do.xyz/ you can select a directory and let AI get to work inside of it without having to worry about side effects.
The Fily System Access API is the best thing that happened to the web in years. It makes web apps first class productivity applications.
It definitely makes deployment cheaper, but I'm skeptical about relying on the browser for state management in longer chains. I tried this for a publishing tool and ended up migrating back to LangGraph and Celery just to ensure reliability. The infrastructure savings weren't worth the headache of handling edge cases on the client.
> It makes web apps first class productivity applications.
They won’t be first-class as long as native UI still has the upper hand.
This battle is long won in favor of webtech in every realm but 3d/video editing/audio work/things that do gpu heavy lifting like game engines.
Outside those sort of spaces it’s hard to name a popular piece of software still on native that isn’t a wrapped webapp.
> video editing
cough CapCut cough
In which way does native UI have the upper hand, do you think? To me it seems like a lot of users are largely indifferent to this aspect (e.g. so many applications nowadays being Electron/browser based). If browsers keep gaining capabilities then it seems like this gap will get even smaller.
I’ve never used a webapp that felt nicer than native software, it’s always very clearly a compromise.
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Unfortunately, this feature of the API is not supported (yet?) either by Safari or Firefox.
The guarantee of web page never edit file on your disk(only create new ones) does not hold on this api though. I know it's what makes this api useful. But at the same time, there is big risk that user never expected this and results into giant security issue.
Firefox and safari are generally very conservative about new api that can enable new type of exploits.
At least firefox and safari does implement origin private file system. So, while you can't edit file on user disk directly. You can import the whole project into browser. Finish the edit and export it.
Browsers have had widespread support for processing files via drag-and-drop and the <input> element since HTML5 (< 2015). The last holdout on allowing the filepicker to accept a full directory (and its subdirectories, recursively—rather than 1 or N individual files) was Safari sometime around (before) 2020.
The Chrome team's new, experimental APIs are a separate matter. They provide additional capabilities, but many programs can get along just fine without since they don't don't strictly need them in order to work—if they would ever even have end up using them at all. A bunch of the applications in the original post fall into this category. You don't need new or novel APIs to be able to hash a file, for example. It's a developer education problem (see also: hubris).
Providing a web app with edit access to a local directory is really needed for this to be usable. Without that you're constantly managing downloaded files and manually replacing things. I do think this is a case where the File System Access API shines.
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Because it is a ChromeOS Platform API, not that it matters with the Chrome market share.