Ask HN: Who's Using the Origin Private File System?

5 points

a year ago

I think the OPFS [0] is just awesome. (For the uninitiated: each website gets a directory that only it can access, and it can write to & read from that directory at near-native speed.) Adobe uses it for the web-version of photoshop, to allow it to work with files that can't fit in browser memory [1].

I love it. I have the impulse to use it for basically everything that I don't use localStorage for. I first used it when writing an in-browser vector database, for which it was pretty much perfect. (I liked it so much I wrote an abstraction layer for it so I could write code once and have it work natively, in the browser, or in memory.) OPFS can be used from web workers and has a nice async API. But I very rarely hear anyone else talking about it. I wouldn't be surprised if most web devs don't know it exists. So I thought I'd ask here to see if anyone else is using it.

[0]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/File_System_API/Origin_private_file_system

[1]: https://developer.chrome.com/blog/how-photoshop-solved-working-with-files-larger-than-can-fit-into-memory

2 comments