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from the now-you-see-it-now-you-don't dept.
Where's our data, Google? Chrome 79 update 'a catastrophe' for Android devs with WebView apps:
A change to the location of profile data in Chrome 79 on Android, the new version rolling out now, means that applications using the WebView component lose data stored locally.
"This is a catastrophe; our users' data are being deleted as they receive the update," complained one developer.
[...] Google said it has halted the rollout, which is estimated at 50 per cent of devices.
The problem appears to stem from a change to the location of profile data in Chromium, the open source project on which Google Chrome is based. Some applications, such as those built with Apache Cordova, use the WebView component extensively, and in these cases the location of local data is determined by this component.
The upgrade to Chrome 79 should migrate this data to the new location, but a Chromium engineer remarked that "unfortunately local storage was missed off the list of files migrated."
[...] It gets worse. "There are several more missed migrations. 'databases' contains the websql dbs 'QuotaManager', and 'QuotaManager-journal' tracks site storage quotas," said another engineer.
One would think that after the deleting of user's files by a Microsoft Windows auto-update raised such a backlash, that testing for loss of data would be a top priority.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Wednesday December 18 2019, @07:00PM
I'm not sure whether your assertion that it's a top-down request is correct, but it's definitely another reason I'd never use Chrome. My first reason is that I don't like the way it handles bookmarks, but since then lots of other reasons have appeared.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.