Products · Pattern or everyday thing
File APIs
Raised as a usability problem by 8 people on Hacker News over 5 years (2021–2025), in 6 threads.
People raised many different problems with File APIs, but no single problem has yet been raised by 3 people in 3 different months and threads.
Unreviewed issues were grouped by machine: Claude Haiku labelled each comment as a usability complaint, named what it's about and summed up the problem in a line, and a small model grouped similar problems. Nobody has checked them by hand. Expect mistakes.
The newest 8 complaints
- Poorly designed file API causes even experts to make mistakes2025-01-24
- File API is so hard to use that even experts make mistakes2025-01-23
- Even experts misuse the file API, assuming non-atomic or reordered operations behave safely2025-01-23
- User must re-select the directory on every fresh page load2024-12-20
- Browser file storage is so slow it is unusable beyond trivial uses2024-11-15
- API ergonomics are poor enough to make it unusable as a storage layer2023-10-19
- File System API is confusing and hard to tell which API to use2021-11-23
- Files are too slow and error-prone to update in place, so it is nearly unusable2021-11-02