Voicebox documentation

Receipt: does OPFS need a user gesture, and is persistence granted?

Date: 2026-09-19 · lane: ds-flash-2 · trigger: astra read 02-environment.md as a consumer and found a false promise: §1.8 told the interface to say “Grant access to continue” when a reopened project needs a click for its handle. True of a picked directory (File System Access) and false of OPFS, which is origin-private.

Method

loadtime.html, served over http://127.0.0.1, calls navigator.storage.getDirectory() at parse time — no click, no key, no devtools evaluation — then creates, writes and reads back a file, and reports navigator.userActivation as sampled at the moment of the call. Running it in the console instead would not have answered the question: an evaluation carries activation, and the first attempt did exactly that (isActive: true), which is why the page does the work itself.

Result

RESULT:{"getDirectory":"ok","readBack":"load-ok",
        "activationAtCall":{"isActive":false,"hasBeenActive":false}}

OPFS needs no user gesture, and the file survives a reload (it is read back from the same origin-private directory on a later navigation).

And on durability, measured in the same origin:

persisted(): false        persist() -> false        estimate: usage 185 B, quota 10,737,418,425 B

Persistence is a request the browser may decline, which is why the durability state is required rather than decorative — and why a peer project must be exportable.

Consequences adopted

• §1.8’s “Grant access to continue” applies only to a picked directory; a peer project has no permissions dance, and the document now says which is which.
• The project record stores the OPFS-relative path and re-resolves the handle at startup; no handle is persisted, and identity is placement + location because an OPFS path means nothing outside its origin.
• durability.persisted is recorded per open and shown.