IndexedDB

Raised as a usability problem by 18 people on Hacker News over 14 years (2012–2025), in 18 threads.

People raised many different problems with IndexedDB, 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 19 complaints

Slow record fetching forces loading everything into RAM or slow iteration2025-12-04
Raw API is so unusable and nonsensical it needs wrapper libraries2025-08-29
Frustratingly slow on some devices, causing lag for users2025-02-12
Cannot index values inside objects in arrays, and query syntax is very limited2024-10-15
Documentation is confusing and hard for the author to follow2024-01-28
Callback-style API is awkward to use, a leftover from before promises2022-10-29
Browser-stored data is opaque, can't see it as ordinary files to debug2022-02-19
API is awful and a pain to use without a wrapper2022-01-15
Its query expressiveness is very limited and it is inconvenient to use2021-10-26
Writing IndexedDB iteration code is annoying to maintain compared to SQL queries2021-08-13
Transactions auto-commit, forcing awkward architecture for writing multiple things together2021-06-15
Cannot run compound range queries or joins, forcing slow full scans2021-06-15
Transactions are confusing: unclear how long they stay open and when they commit2021-04-28
API is awkward to use and IndexedDB is slow and limited2021-04-02
Sort order undocumented; developer had to read Chrome source to learn it2016-10-26
Harder to use and more verbose than SQL, with a steep learning curve and no structured queries2015-09-10
Simple multi-condition queries need heavy boilerplate and nested async callbacks2015-06-30
IndexedDB API is maddening to use, and offline APIs are difficult for developers2014-11-03
Setup and upgrade API (onupgradeneeded/setVersion) is needlessly complex and hard to understand2012-03-05