It's been in Chrome for 6 years and I'm not aware of any problems it's caused.

Yet. It’s not hard to imagine a case where it is a bad idea to give the browser access to the whole content of a directory.

There is a reason why it’s Chromium browsers only, don’t you think?

So what should I do if I want to make an app with this functionality? Do I have to tell users to download and run some executable? You can imagine a case where that is a bit riskier than a nicely sandboxed web app with permission to access one directory.

> Do I have to tell users to download and run some executable?

Well, yes.

The alternative is to give any malicious ad the ability to drive-by-download malware onto your machine.

Did you miss that this has been shipped in Chrome for 6 years? How many drive-by-download viruses has your machine gotten since then? Zero for me...

Apple will never implement anything in a browser that could make a web app as capable as a native mobile app, they are simply too greedy. Firefox typically doesn't implement these things unless they have to because they don't have the resources that Google and Apple do.

Just because a problem is not hard to imagine it doesn't mean that the problem is actually a problem in practice. It is worth asking if there are any signs of it existing for real.

I hear a lot of this "nothing has happened so far" from people who DUI before their first crash and people who use the same password on multiple sites before their first credential stuffing hack