I think it is obvious why the API is useful, productivity apps(as well as anything else that needs open and save files) on the web suffer from the friction of uploading and then downloading a file which makes for bad UX.
You can't account for every possibility but the permission management seems clear and doesn't persist. The notifications seem fairly overt as well. The fact that it is user driven too makes it hard to imagine that many/any users would not only accidentally allow permissions but then also accidentally select a sensitive file/directory. Only time will tell though.
I'm a Systems Reliability and DevOps engineer for Netdata Inc. When not working, I enjoy studying linguistics and history, playing video games, and cooking all kinds of international cuisine.
The 'upload' issue is actually a non-issue even without the FS API. You can (on a vast majority of modern browsers) pull off a 'fake' upload in any number of ways that works just fine without hitting the remote server.
Downloads are the big issue, because the current behavior of web browsers does not allow for apps to hint the browser that links should use 'Save As' behavior (but, FWIW, downloads don’t actually need to hit the server either, you can use either a Data URI (if the file is small enough) or the Blob API to generate a 'donwload' client side).
I think it is obvious why the API is useful, productivity apps(as well as anything else that needs open and save files) on the web suffer from the friction of uploading and then downloading a file which makes for bad UX.
You can't account for every possibility but the permission management seems clear and doesn't persist. The notifications seem fairly overt as well. The fact that it is user driven too makes it hard to imagine that many/any users would not only accidentally allow permissions but then also accidentally select a sensitive file/directory. Only time will tell though.
The 'upload' issue is actually a non-issue even without the FS API. You can (on a vast majority of modern browsers) pull off a 'fake' upload in any number of ways that works just fine without hitting the remote server.
Downloads are the big issue, because the current behavior of web browsers does not allow for apps to hint the browser that links should use 'Save As' behavior (but, FWIW, downloads don’t actually need to hit the server either, you can use either a Data URI (if the file is small enough) or the Blob API to generate a 'donwload' client side).
There's at least github.com/jimmywarting/StreamSave... (or for older browsers github.com/eligrey/FileSaver.js), it actually took me longer to figure out "uploading" files locally than saving files.