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> Why can't they be distributed as a PWA that interacts with logical files that exist in my filesystem? Files I can generate from other applications (like perfo

by sgbeal 4y ago

> Why can't they be distributed as a PWA that interacts with logical files that exist in my filesystem? Files I can generate from other applications (like performance profilers). And files which other folks can generate, like marketing malware injected there by out-of-browser applications and/or shady OS vendors (who might pre-populate data for their own sites, as well as business partners' sites (for a fee, of course), under the pretense of "improving user experience"). If browser-accessible storage is accessible to arbitrary out-of-browser applications, arbitrary package updates and installers can _put stuff there_ or overwrite stuff which is already there. We can be certain that such things would rarely, if ever, be to users' benefit.

apatheticonion 4y ago
Obviously it would be behind a user access prompt. With Google Sheets, one thing I find annoying is; I am unable to write/pre-format a bunch of data to a google sheets specific document (containing formulas, graphs, etc). Instead, I must interact with the Google Sheets API, force the user to SSO, and programmatically assemble a sheet via the API. It's difficult to distribute templates, and google sheet document links cannot be moved out of Google Drive. If they are, they cannot be recovered when they are moved back into Google Drive. Macros are evaluated by Google's cloud compute and not locally on my machine, so they have some crazy convoluted way to implement macros. This is the model a lot of web applications take - "anything happening in the browser is not happening on your computer". I want to view the web as an alternative to GTK, Cocca, WinUI - an ergonomic cross platform GUI toolkit. Electron is evidence that I am not alone in that thought process. Giving the browser greater capabilities with a sensible user-prompt security model would allow PWAs to replace Electron - reducing the overhead of running several Chromium instances to access applications that are just web apps which need FS access.

by sgbeal 4y ago

apatheticonion 4y ago

Obviously it would be behind a user access prompt. With Google Sheets, one thing I find annoying is; I am unable to write/pre-format a bunch of data to a google sheets specific document (containing formulas, graphs, etc). Instead, I must interact with the Google Sheets API, force the user to SSO, and programmatically assemble a sheet via the API. It's difficult to distribute templates, and google sheet document links cannot be moved out of Google Drive. If they are, they cannot be recovered when they are moved back into Google Drive. Macros are evaluated by Google's cloud compute and not locally on my machine, so they have some crazy convoluted way to implement macros. This is the model a lot of web applications take - "anything happening in the browser is not happening on your computer". I want to view the web as an alternative to GTK, Cocca, WinUI - an ergonomic cross platform GUI toolkit. Electron is evidence that I am not alone in that thought process. Giving the browser greater capabilities with a sensible user-prompt security model would allow PWAs to replace Electron - reducing the overhead of running several Chromium instances to access applications that are just web apps which need FS access.