I was using (abusing?) localStorage for a game I'm working on. I was using it to store entries for every word in the English dictionary, which is around 85,000 entries. I needed two entries per word actually, because I needed it indexed two ways. It worked; I tested it on Chrome Linux, Mac Safari, a first generation ipad, and on Android. However, it was slow to load, and started erroring out sometimes in Chrome Linux, saying quota exceeded or something along those lines. Basically I ended up deciding that localStorage wasn't right for me for large amounts of data, and redid it another way.
These look like awesome and useful abstractions for a lot of things, I may use it for saving and loading games, for example. But I recommend caution if you're thinking about using localStorage to store a lot of entries.
The quota for localStorage varies from 2MB to well, very high, depending on the browser. The average is around 5MB. There's a page here that shows results for various browsers: http://dev-test.nemikor.com/web-storage/support-test/
It's not advisable to use it for a lot of data, especially if you actually need that data to stay around - it's better in situations where it's okay if the data goes away. You also need to be ready to handle over quota errors - e.g. in my lscache library, we kick out old data when that happens.
I talked about that in a localStorage talk recently (http://client-side-storage.appspot.com/ - click "show notes").
You might want to use the Lawnchair library, as that can be used with both localStorage and IndexedDB, which can theoretically handle a lot more data with better performance.
Thanks for sharing this! lscache is super cool. I also just watched and thoroughly enjoyed your Google IO talk on shyness work-arounds (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=52Ml_zax4A0&t=24m9s). Great stuff all around.
I'm using localstorage to remember settings that used to be stored in cookies. These are things like the collapsed state of a panel, the dimensions of a popup window, and the most recently used values of a location picker. It works really well for that.
I think people run into problems when they store megabytes instead of kilobytes. Localstorage is essentially cookie storage without the networking dependency. Treat it like that and it works well.
This is really cool. The entry barrier to building HTML5 mobile apps gets lower every day, thanks in part to developers like those at Twilio who open-source their hard work for the benefit of the community.
Thanks for sharing.
Many localStorage libraries fallback to older techniques (window.name, userData, etc). It looks like BankersBox has an adaptor interface, so if you wanted support in the older browsers, you could write an adaptor (check out Lawnchair/store.js to see how to use those older APIs).
These look like awesome and useful abstractions for a lot of things, I may use it for saving and loading games, for example. But I recommend caution if you're thinking about using localStorage to store a lot of entries.