65% of people who were asked with what question and what panel and what information provided?

This whole idea is stupid. Another C program with and ability to run arbitrary code off the network written by idiots and nasty folk being given arbitrary filesystem access. Have we learned nothing? We need more controls (MAC / process sandboxing) not less.

Just because someone wants to do something to make their lives easier and asks a set of people what they want who says yes doesn't mean it's a good idea.

I say this as someone who has written desktop/web integration stuff over the years without this.

The File System Access API does not grant arbitrary file system access. At most it provides access to a folder manually chosen by the user, with limits on which folders can be accessed (e.g. root or entire documents folder is not allowed).

It is unclear why the views of 65% should be also pushed onto me.

You’re free to not use it?

This is a logical fallacy and you should be ashamed of yourself for spreading it. You can "engineer" (manipulate) low information voters into voting a certain way. This means nothing.

?!? No one is voting on anything. The OP was quoting the stats of how many users used a feature when it was put in front of them. Are you suggesting they “engineered” their users to save files on the local file system when they didn’t actually want to? To what end? What purpose would that ever serve?

Only on Hacker News would “we offered users the ability to save to disk and 65% used it” be seen as a sinister conspiracy theory.

This is a point against your argument, not in its favour.

The percentages of users who use or don't use specific features, in isolation, cannot be effectively used to determine those users' opinions on the relative merits of those features. There are so many other factors at play that you really need to do some kind of explicit survey to determine whether, just as a for instance, some of those 65% would prefer a different way of saving files but don't have the choice (or think they don't), and, conversely, whether some of those 35% would be happy to use that feature, but don't know about it.

Jesus Christ. It’s indicative, that’s all. No one is claiming it’s a statistically significant survey to the nth degree or anything. This is how people iterate products. You put a feature in front of people and see how many use it. How many the return to use it again. OP said they put the two options on an equal footing and 65% chose local disk save. It’s an indicator, nothing more, nothing less.

I suspect that the majority of those 65% of users (remember that most users are not tech savvy) just click ok on whatever popup appears, that does not mean that they want, but rather they don't understand.

Are you really saying that the users of Construct, a 2D game engine, are not tech savvy or do not really understand what they are doing by granting local file access?

Yes.

Millions of people use powerful Excel features every day to literally run the world, and yet malicious macros in office documents are still a prime way to hack any business. User is not the same as information security expert.

To be clear, we also offer cloud save (e.g. to Google Drive), or downloading a copy of your project. Our software makes no particular effort to highlight any particular option. We see 65% of users freely choose the file system option, and most of the others use cloud save.