As the Web browsers take on roles that the dedicated desktop applications used to do it isn't a huge surprise to see some local cache persistence features finally make it to your browsers.

Firefox: Dom Storage

DOM Storage is the name given to the set of storage-related features introduced in the Web Applications 1.0 specification. DOM Storage is designed to provide a larger, securer, and easier-to-use alternative to storing information in cookies. It is currently only available in Mozilla-based browsers, notably starting with Firefox 2.

In IE 8 : Dom Storage

DOM Storage is often compared to HTTP cookies. Like cookies, Web developers can store per-session or domain-specific data as name/value pairs on the client using DOM Storage. However, unlike cookies, DOM Storage makes it easier to control how information stored by one window is visible to another.
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DOM Storage also offers significantly more disk space than cookies. In Internet Explorer, cookies can store only 4 kilobyte (KB) of data. This byte total can be one name/value pair of 4 KB, or it can be up to 20 name/value pairs that have a total size of 4 KB. By comparison, DOM Storage provides roughly 10 megabytes (MB) for each storage area.

Cookie security is a still a concern these days. Many cookie provides do support client ids instead of actually cleartext name/passwords these days which is nice, but there are still opportunities to hijack a session or use that guid against you if someone were to acquire your cookie. How about cross domain snooping?

Now, if the browsers would support file-encryption that would make me feel better about this. Go HTML 5!


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Created 7 weeks, 1 day ago