Closed Bug 681545 Opened 13 years ago Closed 12 years ago

method to allow user to grant more (or perhaps unlimited) storage for web applications

Categories

(Firefox :: General, enhancement)

enhancement
Not set
normal

Tracking

()

RESOLVED WONTFIX

People

(Reporter: jokeyrhyme, Unassigned)

References

Details

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) AppleWebKit/535.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/13.0.782.112 Safari/535.1

Steps to reproduce:

I am a web developer, with applications that will require more persistent storage than is currently offered by many web browsers:
http://dev-test.nemikor.com/web-storage/support-test/

My web applications may need to store (and later retrieve) a single string that is several megabytes long. They may also need to store multiple strings that cumulatively occupy hundreds of megabytes.


Actual results:

My current experience is that most browsers fail to provide unlimited persistent storage (localStorage, indexedDB, webSQL, etc) to web applications. Safari (and Mobile Safari) seems to be the only browser that will ask the user if they will allow more space to be used by a web application (and it is buggy). Other browsers will just throw a storage exception when the limit is reached.


Expected results:

When an asynchronous storage request is invoked in JavaScript, and the request would exceed the current storage quota, the user should be asked for permission to increase the storage permissions for the current web application. If they accept, then the asynchronous storage request should continue to execute as normal, if not then an exception should be thrown.

There is a related issue being discussed here:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=658117

There is a related issue being discussed in the Chromium project (Google Chrome):
http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=61676
OS: Windows 7 → All
Hardware: x86_64 → All
See Also: → 658117
In order to take the pain out of using and developing web applications with persistent local storage, I would suggest we need the following:
- a method to determine how much space is already used
- a method to determine how much space is available
- a method to prompt the user for access to more space (or have it done automatically as required)
- applications should be able to request more space in advance in configurable chunks, to lower the frequency of requests (eg. one big chunk instead of many smaller chunks)

If all the different storage mechanisms have separate quota / limits, then we will need the above methods to be defined for all of them. Personally, I would prefer it if all mechanisms shared the same quota, as this would simplify the user experience.
Note that in the Firefox indexedDB implementation you are initially granted 50MB of storage. Once you run out of those 50MB Firefox will automatically prompt the user to allow for more. If the user approves this the page is granted unlimited storage.

So at the most the user will be faced with two prompts.
I am glad to hear it. I have been waiting for the IndexedDB implementations to drop the vendor prefixes, but once that happens I will be all over it. :)

It would be terrific if this behaviour could be applied to localStorage, for consistency.

It would be even better if this behaviour became part of the WebAPI standard, so that all browsers behaved the same way:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=673923
Considering comment #2 this bug is invalid (the requested implementation already exists).

Reporter, please mark this bug accordingly (Resolved-Invalid). If you wish enhancements to be added to this implementation (as specified in comment #3), please file separate enhancement requests for them.
There are still storage mechanisms that have arbitrary limits without any means for the web developer or the user to increase, ie localStorage.

As Gecko's indexedDB implementation is still vendor-prefixed, I can hardly recommend a mission critical web application be developed using it at this stage.

I would not consider this bug closed until all persistent storage mechanisms are able to increase their storage quotas with the users permission.
Severity: normal → enhancement
Status: UNCONFIRMED → NEW
Ever confirmed: true
(In reply to jokeyrhyme from comment #5)
> I would not consider this bug closed until all persistent storage mechanisms
> are able to increase their storage quotas with the users permission.

Well, that's not going to happen for localStorage.
Status: NEW → RESOLVED
Closed: 12 years ago
Resolution: --- → WONTFIX
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