> Now ITP has aligned the remaining script-writable storage forms with the existing client-side cookie restriction, deleting all of a website’s script-writable storage after seven days of Safari use without user interaction on the site.
If a website hasn't been used for 7 days, I'm happy for its data to disappear and save space on my device.
If a website hasn't been used for 7 days, I'm happy for its data to disappear and save space on my device.
You might be, but maybe not everyone is. I've worked on apps based around multimedia content where downloading in advance to watch or listen later was a big deal, because a typical user also travels a lot and might well be going away for longer than a week. Even if they can get the same data again next time they're online, it might still be much slower and more expensive for them to do that on an international data plan instead of back home.
Then wouldn't it be appropriate to offer a native app to offer that functionality? A web browser in 2020 is a place to run vast swathes of untrusted code safely; it is not a digital workstation platform, that is the job of the OS. If what I am downloading from you is important enough that I want to have it even offline, then I trust you enough to install your native app.
A web browser in 2020 is a place to run vast swathes of untrusted code safely; it is not a digital workstation platform, that is the job of the OS.
I'm not sure how much that assumption really holds any more, nor why it should necessarily continue to do so even if it has so far. Technology evolves, and so does how we use it. In the case of the web, and web apps in particular, they have evolved to satisfy a need for convenience in software distribution that many traditional desktop OSes had hopelessly neglected for a very long time and where the developer experience for native mobile apps is less than ideal.
I appreciate your comment about the trust issue, but the bottom line is that these technologies do serve a useful purpose for some people -- I have the customer feedback at my own businesses to make that clear -- and the experience web developers can offer on Android with PWAs will now be significantly better than what they can offer on iOS.
The fact that that is possible does not change the role of the web browser in the modern computing experience. If you want to build an entire VM that runs in Electron, be my guest, but that's orthogonal to the issue of how Safari should handle storage by default.
The fact that that is possible does not change the role of the web browser in the modern computing experience.
But why shouldn't new possibilities change the modern computing experience or the role of browsers within it? Millions of users are benefitting from new capabilities of modern browsers, even if they don't know the details any more than they know what goes into any other software they use. Why is local storage of data, or the idea of a PWA more generally, special in this respect?
7 days is actually a really short period. There are lots of apps and websites that I only open on my phone every now and then. I would never use them if I had to log in almost every time.
Link: https://webkit.org/blog/10218/full-third-party-cookie-blocki...
Relevant quote (emphasis mine):
> Now ITP has aligned the remaining script-writable storage forms with the existing client-side cookie restriction, deleting all of a website’s script-writable storage after seven days of Safari use without user interaction on the site.
If a website hasn't been used for 7 days, I'm happy for its data to disappear and save space on my device.