alt Hacker NewsWait, wait, wait: browsers allow websites to store junk on my drive? They take up gigabytes of memory and still write to disk on top of this? Without even asking whether the site can use local storage?
Years and years back when laptops still had HDDs, I had a script to put the Firefox profile &c on a ramdisk and sync it on reboots so that it didn't spin up the drive constantly. I guess I should have kept doing it.
It's a sad day when Arch users are right (again) https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Firefox/Profile_on_RAM
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> Without even asking whether the site can use local storage?
Where did you see this in the article? I had some recollection that Firefox at least did require asking the user.
That surprised me as well.
I thought the whole point of cookies, local storage, session storage, and indexed DB were to avoid what origin private file system is doing.
You mean I could have just saved stuff as a file this whole time instead of serializing it to a string? Why didn't we just do this from the start?
Is this surprising? Websites have long been silently writing to disk, for cache, cookies, and blobs. OPFS just provides a file-system-like API for ultimately the same functionality