Not well. I'm optimistic about the web in general, but I consider good, reliable clientside storage to still be an unsolved problem, at least for the moment.
Some of the things we're still missing:
- the ability to easily share data between domains without opening yourself up to massive security risks.
- the ability to share data with native apps.
- the ability to move data between browsers without syncing it to an online account.
- the ability for normal users to inspect offline data.
- the ability to trust that browsers like Safari won't just arbitrarily delete your data one day.[0]
- the ability to trust that browser upgrades won't ever corrupt the data you have stored.[1]
- the ability to share large amounts of data without worrying about storage limits (this matters a lot if you're making an editor like Atom or Visual Studio).
Typically, what I see with offline apps is that they'll use offline storage, but they don't trust it. They use it when possible as a progressive enhancement, but then they have to sync that data to a server someplace if it's something that users actually care about. And that matches my experiences as a web developer as well. I can't imagine building something like a password manager or text editor in-browser that was only storing data locally, I wouldn't trust that.
It's also not just a technological problem, it's a problem of UX. If I tried to make a purely offline web app, I'd be getting angry customer calls in a week asking where their data went just from them clearing browser history and not realizing that it deleted all their data as well. There isn't a user-friendly, user-controlled way to indicate that storage for one website should be permanent, and users aren't really trained to think that way about the web anyway -- their instinct is to think of it as transient.
Some of the things we're still missing:
- the ability to easily share data between domains without opening yourself up to massive security risks.
- the ability to share data with native apps.
- the ability to move data between browsers without syncing it to an online account.
- the ability for normal users to inspect offline data.
- the ability to trust that browsers like Safari won't just arbitrarily delete your data one day.[0]
- the ability to trust that browser upgrades won't ever corrupt the data you have stored.[1]
- the ability to share large amounts of data without worrying about storage limits (this matters a lot if you're making an editor like Atom or Visual Studio).
Typically, what I see with offline apps is that they'll use offline storage, but they don't trust it. They use it when possible as a progressive enhancement, but then they have to sync that data to a server someplace if it's something that users actually care about. And that matches my experiences as a web developer as well. I can't imagine building something like a password manager or text editor in-browser that was only storing data locally, I wouldn't trust that.
It's also not just a technological problem, it's a problem of UX. If I tried to make a purely offline web app, I'd be getting angry customer calls in a week asking where their data went just from them clearing browser history and not realizing that it deleted all their data as well. There isn't a user-friendly, user-controlled way to indicate that storage for one website should be permanent, and users aren't really trained to think that way about the web anyway -- their instinct is to think of it as transient.
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[0]: https://ar.al/2020/03/25/apple-just-killed-offline-web-apps-...
[1]: https://www.androidpolice.com/2019/12/17/google-fixes-chrome...