[sharpercoder]

Every time I see something about sqlite, I become sad. It reminds me of the failure of the w3 standards comittee to accept it as web standard. They rejected sqlite because no competing implementation existed. Furthermore, "public domain" license of the software was also a hurdle, iirc.

[dude01]

We literally lost several years for web app advancement because of that. Reading the decision making, it seemed like overly-legalistic engineers, but I'm open to conspiracy theories that this decision enhanced mobile app store adoption.

[smitherfield]

No, it was Mozilla who killed it[1] over Apple and Google's strong objections.

[1] For pretty much complete nonsense NIH and standards-lawyering reasons.

[lambda]

> For pretty much complete nonsense NIH and standards-lawyering reasons.

You consider the fact that there is no spec other than "how the current implementation works", so no way to know if the code than works on version n will continue to work on version n+1, and no way to produce an alternate implementation, is a "complete nonsense reason"?

I also believe that it wasn't just Mozilla, but also Microsoft that scuttled this. Mozilla was the louder voice, but Microsoft never supported it either.

[smitherfield]

> You consider the fact that there is no spec other than "how the current implementation works", so no way to know if the code than works on version n will continue to work on version n+1, and no way to produce an alternate implementation, is a "complete nonsense reason"?

Yes. Sqlite is among the most stable and mature software in existence. I challenge you to name a single browser technology or API that has been anywhere remotely as stable as Sqlite, especially as implemented. As mentioned elsewhere ITT, Hwaci has contractual commitments to support backwards-compatible Sqlite3 for at least the next 35 years.

At that point, if I had to guess, "web browsers" won't be around any more, the web itself will be a dying or dead legacy technology, and companies yet to be founded will lead the tech sector, while Apple, Google, Microsoft and most likely of all Mozilla will be IBM-style dead letters or Digital[1]-style dead.

Sqlite was primarily written by one person and is maintained by three people.[2] If for some reason Mozilla had to fork or take over maintenance of Sqlite, it wouldn't even be worth noticing in their budget. It would, in fact, likely cost considerably less developer time than they spent designing, implementing and lobbying for IndexedDB.

More likely, if Sqlite3 were no longer being suitably maintained, all the browser vendors, plus the hundreds of other major tech companies that use it, would jointly endow a Sqlite Foundation to take over maintainence, which might cost Mozilla 5 grand or so a year, ye gods.

Even if Mozilla felt compelled for some reason (avoiding dependencies?) to rewrite Sqlite from scratch, Sqlite is 125k lines[3] of ANSI C compared to Firefox's 18 million lines[4] of C++, so Sqlite represents roughly one month of Firefox development time.

Firefox, Chrome, IE/Edge and Safari all make very extensive use of Sqlite internally, including to implement IndexedDB, so, obviously, Mozilla does not actually consider dependency on Sqlite and its API to present a meaningful risk.

Further, as things stand (and as they stood in 2010), Sqlite's massive footprint in the Firefox codebase means Mozilla already must rely on Sqlite remaining maintained, just the same as if WebSQL had been standardized.

> I also believe that it wasn't just Mozilla, but also Microsoft that scuttled this. Mozilla was the louder voice, but Microsoft never supported it either.

MS, especially at the time, ordinarily tried to slow or stall the standardization process for web technologies in general, so IE wouldn't fall too far behind. I expect better of Mozilla.

Mozilla was also by far the loudest (really the only) voice against WebSQL; MS barely participated in the conversation and was mostly noncommittal when it did. It's unlikely MS would've objected at all if Mozilla hadn't given them the opening.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Equipment_Corporation

[2] https://sqlite.org/crew.html

[3] https://sqlite.org/testing.html

[4] https://www.openhub.net/p/firefox/analyses/latest/languages_...

[bambax]

I too am so disappointed SQLite isn't available in modern browsers (esp. since it was, for a time). But can't it be resurrected? Couldn't we set up a petition somewhere to bring it back?

[dspillett]

It is a bit of a "would you really do that in production?" type hack, but there is a pure JS compile of SQLite3 that you could use: https://github.com/kripken/sql.js/

Possible problems:

* Nearly half an MB of library to add to your project which might be a concern on mobile (~2.1MB uncompressed.

* It handles the whole DB in memory rather than trying to use any sort of local storage as a block store, which pumps up memory use (again, mobile user may particularly find this an issue) and to persist data you have to pickle the whole DB as a single array (which could be a significant performance issue if the data changes regularly and is not very small) and reload it upon new visit.

* Concurrency between multiple tabs/windows is going to be an issue for the same reason.

[dude01]

Actually, it's still available in Chrome, Safari and Opera. I guess Firefox and IE still don't have it.

[HelloNurse]

And the horrible excuse that SQL was too complex to be exposed to web developers, so we now have SQL emulation libraries on top of IndexedDB that is implemented with SQLite. Oh yeah!

[chj]

And they think index db is better..

[mschuster91]

IndexedDB is a hellhole, but it fitted the NoSQL trend at the time - that's why it was picked and SQLite dumped as "fossil".

I'd love it if someone takes the time and creates a SQL engine based on IndexedDB so one can do serious SQL work instead of working around the many limitations in IndexedDB.

[triangleman]

That is strange, for some reason I was under the impression that all browsers natively support sqlite. I even installed a Chrome extension when I wanted a gui to browse sqlite db's. I am disappointed to hear this.