That is definitely not a good alternative. Three major problems I've had with it:
1. That heuristic is not just in Safari, it's in Chrome too. Firefox is the only one with a normal permission dialog. And the heuristic is really confusing for users! They come to me and say "how can I stop my data from being deleted?" and I have no answer if the heuristic says they can't enable persistent storage.
2. It only helps with eviction (deleting data due to low disk space), not other scenarios where data may be deleted. Such as clearing the "browser cache" without realizing what that implies, which may even be done automatically or through some third party app.
3. I have a place in my app settings page where users can see their persistent storage setting and also enable it if they want. I have many reports of users who enable it, then check back some time later, and somehow it's disabled. So the persistent data setting seems to not be persistent.
I've been working on a local-first web app, and ran into some of the same issues. Good to learn about these other pain points..
All of these make the so-called "persistent" local storage unreliable and impractical. I don't understand how browser vendors expect people to use such a feature where the data can be deleted at any time, where neither the developer nor the user has any control over how that happens.
I don't think there is a real plan, I think it's just the current state of the power struggle between two competing factions. Some browser devs prioritize web apps being as good as native apps. And some browser devs prioritize not causing problems for users (such as using too many resources). Seems like sometimes one faction sneaks something past the other to advance their cause a bit, and in total the result is incoherent.
1. That heuristic is not just in Safari, it's in Chrome too. Firefox is the only one with a normal permission dialog. And the heuristic is really confusing for users! They come to me and say "how can I stop my data from being deleted?" and I have no answer if the heuristic says they can't enable persistent storage.
2. It only helps with eviction (deleting data due to low disk space), not other scenarios where data may be deleted. Such as clearing the "browser cache" without realizing what that implies, which may even be done automatically or through some third party app.
3. I have a place in my app settings page where users can see their persistent storage setting and also enable it if they want. I have many reports of users who enable it, then check back some time later, and somehow it's disabled. So the persistent data setting seems to not be persistent.