

Briefly, it allows Flash objects to store up to 100 KB of data per domain. In 2002, Adobe introduced a feature in Flash 6 that gained the unfortunate and misleading name of “Flash cookies.” Within the Flash environment, the feature is properly known as Local Shared Objects. ) IE does not present any form of permissions dialog, and there is no allowance for increasing the amount of storage available. And hey, 640 KB ought to be enough for anybody.

(Trusted domains, such as intranet sites, can store 10 times that amount. userData allows web pages to store up to 64 KB of data per domain, in a hierarchical XML-based structure. One of these things was called DHTML Behaviors, and one of these behaviors was called userData. To that end, as part of the First Great Browser Wars, Microsoft invented a great many things and included them in their browser-to-end-all-browser-wars, Internet Explorer. Or at least, that’s what Microsoft wanted the world to think. In the beginning, there was only Internet Explorer. But they have three potentially dealbreaking downsides:Ĭookies are included with every HTTP request, thereby slowing down your web application by needlessly transmitting the same data over and overĬookies are included with every HTTP request, thereby sending data unencrypted over the internet (unless your entire web application is served over SSL )Ĭookies are limited to about 4 KB of data - enough to slow down your application (see above), but not enough to be terribly usefulĪnd isn’t transmitted to the serverīefore HTML5, all attempts to achieve this were ultimately unsatisfactory in different ways.Ī Brief History of Local Storage Hacks Before HTML5 Cookies were invented early in the web’s history, and indeed they can be used for persistent local storage of small amounts of data. Historically, web applications have had none of these luxuries. If your native client application needs local storage beyond key/value pairs, you can embed your own database, invent your own file format, or any number of other solutions.

These values may be stored in the registry, INI files, XML files, or some other place according to platform convention. For native applications, the operating system typically provides an abstraction layer for storing and retrieving application-specific data like preferences or runtime state. ersistent local storage is one of the areas where native client applications have held an advantage over web applications. The Past, Present & Future of Local Storage for Web Applications
