Discuss limits applied to storage.local API

[hanguokai]

(To avoid getting off topic #350, I open another discussion here)

storage.local and storage.sync are the oldest and most commonly used APIs. Usually they are used as persistent storage for user data or user settings.

Storage Quota

At present, storage.local has 5MB limit, storage.sync has 100KB limit. This limitation has existed for a long time. As user devices and cloud storage capabilities improve, should it be increased now?

I suggest increasing the storage limit of storage.sync to 1MB, and the storage limit of storage.local to 50MB.

I know the "unlimitedStorage" permission for storage.local. Due to the 5MB storage limit, I am often hesitant whether to use this permission, especially for user-defined data.

As a contrast, other Web storage technologies can use much more space by default, like CacheStorage and IndexedDB.

The browser's built-in support for data synchronization is great, because it's non-trivial for developers to create their own cloud synchronization. But due to the 100KB storage limit, to use it, I usually have to carefully evaluate each possible data item.

Performance

Does performance degrade as storage usage increases? Different browsers may have different implementations and optimizations. I didn't do the test. Normally, a Key-Value database should not have this problem.

[erosman]

AFA storage.sync, in addition to Maximum total size, please also consider Maximum number of items and especially Maximum item size as well.

[xeenon]

I'm infer of bumping storage.local to 10 MB at least to match the bump of storage.session to 10 MB.

[oliverdunk]

Chrome is in support of raising the storage.local limit to 10 MB.

[oliverdunk]

We've increased the storage.local limit to 10MB in Chrome, and it should be available in Canary later today, and in general from Chrome 114+ once that hits stable: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=1434464.

[fregante]

Great to see that storage.local has been bumped to 10MB. 🎊

Can storage.sync also be increased? 100KB is quite a small amount of data for 2024.

[oliverdunk]

Can storage.sync also be increased? 100KB is quite a small amount of data for 2024.

This is the trickiest one to change since we would need to make sure the syncing mechanism in Chrome is able to handle it. Happy to discuss it but I suspect there would be some hesitation.

[hanguokai]

Rob replied in another issue for storage.sync:

All vendors are against raising the maximum total size

If so, we can close this issue, although developers are looking forward to it very much.

[oliverdunk]

@hanguokai, I think we should keep this open to track increasing the size of storage.local? Agree that there aren't any steps to take with storage.sync though.

[hanguokai]

@oliverdunk Ok, we will close this issue when all browsers implement increasing the maximum total size of storage.local to 10MB. At the moment, only Chrome implements it. I didn't find related issues on Firefox and Safari's issue tracker.

[hanguokai]

I opened a new issue at #520 for storage.sync. I update this issue title and leave this issue only for storage.local, not for storage.sync.