[webkit-dev] localStorage quota limit

[William Edney]

All -

I've been discussing the localStorage quota limit over on this bug with Jeremy Orlow:

https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=31791

To recap from the discussions on that bug:

Jeremy has implemented the localStorage quota on the latest Webkit builds. This caused my usage of localStorage to fail, because as a JS programmer, I assumed that 5MB meant '5 million characters' of storage. This assumption holds true on Firefox 3.5.X+ and IE8, but fails on Webkit since it stores things into localStorage as UTF-16.

One option we discussed on that bug was getting the spec folks to alter the spec in one of three ways:

- specify the quota in terms of 'characters' (or Strings, or whatever) thereby abstracting away the encoding problem entirely.
- specify UTF-8 so that 'MB = characters'
- specify a JS API such that the encoding could be specified.

Jeremy wasn't too taken with any of these proposals, and in any case, they probably need to be taken up on the W3 group defining this stuff, not here.

In any case, as Jeremy states in Comment #5 of the bug report, "the spec's mentioning of 5mb is really just an example". And when I filed this bug on Mozilla's Bugzilla tracker:

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=461684

another comment there points out the same thing. (Note that this bug was originally filed to see if the Mozilla guys would raise their quota to 10MB to match IE8 and, since they don't use double-byte encoding, I was really asking for '10 million characters' there :-)).

Given that, an increase from 5MB to 10MB would 'solve my immediate problem'. And, without going back to the spec folks, I'm not sure that much more can be done here.

Jeremy wanted me to post to get the discussion started (and hopefully attain some consensus :-) ), so let's discuss :-).

Thanks in advance!

Cheers,

- Bill
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.webkit.org/pipermail/webkit-dev/attachments/20091129/3b2f6895/attachment.html>