I am using this api for music player[0] in the browser. Biggest share of my users are using Chromebooks, where besides Android apps are not much alternatives. If this API was not available closest thing would be to make an Electron app, which has much more broad system access to users device than a website using showDirectoryPicker.
Regarding security I think Chrome got right balance on this: you always need to select folder, sensitive ones are excluded, on repeat visits if you try to access a file, it asks you permission again, you can't get full filename paths and so on.
I agree somewhat, but what about poorer regions of the world like parts of Africa or Asia, what is the solution for them? Most of the people there would not or could not pay for every website to use. It would be unfortunate if the web is inaccessible for most people.
Maximising profits and being sustainable are 2 different things. Museums do not need to make money because they are funded externally.
It is like saying artists do not need to make money. You seem to go to the very extremes.
Web needs to make money. Giving tools to advertisers while making sure user privacy is preserved is better than free reign of tracking we have before, no?
I myself do not like ads or tracking, but we need to be realistic and there needs a way to make web sustainable.
How to do that and making sure that monopolies like Google are in check is a valid concern though, but in these conversations is the only point I hear. Ironically Google does not even need these apis because it already has so much data on users, it is primarily for smaller companies.
Every one of my phones before was rooted with custom os flashed, but now I feel exactly the same a as you, it's just not worth it. Kinda sad how stuff is being more and mored locked down.
Just go to home page https://wpt.fyi/ see chart "Browser-specific failures are the number of WPT tests which fail in exactly one browser." Safari leads by a longshot with over 3800 tests failing only in Safari. Firefox has 1700 and Chrome less which kinda correlates to my own personal development experience.
> The "web standard" part is meaningless considering that most production websites will bundle the files together as part of their build/optimization process for size and loading speed, leaving only a giant chunk(s) that resembles nothing like the original ES modules.
I mean code itself will be non readable, but in modern build ouput chunks are using regular esm modules, at least for Vite, Rollup, Parcel and so on. Webpack might be different story, but still.
There was a major push few years ago, but it died down. Basically performance benefits of built modules weren't worth it and with that standard library proposal also lost momentum.
Regarding security I think Chrome got right balance on this: you always need to select folder, sensitive ones are excluded, on repeat visits if you try to access a file, it asks you permission again, you can't get full filename paths and so on.
[0] https://github.com/minht11/local-music-pwa