One of the reasons that certain technocrats favor native applications is their ability to store data locally on the client. HTML5 made a breakthrough by allowing web applications to store data in the browser.

Although cookies are available to store data in the browsers, there are certain disadvantages to that – which were addressed with the invention of HTML5 Web Storage.

The LocalStorage API gives front-end web developers access to a simple key-value datastore that can be used to save data on a users computer. Saving data on the client-side can help to speed up the performance of your web applications as it can reduce the number of database queries that are needed on the server. This frees up valuable server resources and can potentially even lead to reduced infrastructure costs.

Web Storage is a new HTML5 API offering important benefits over traditional cookies. Although the specification is still in W3C draft status, all major browsers support it already.

This means you can start using the API’s sessionStorage and localStorage objects (we will discuss these later on) and enjoy their benefits.

Storing information locally on a user’s computer is a powerful strategy for a developer who is creating something for the Web. In this article, we’ll look at how easy it is to store information on a computer to read later and explain what you can use that for.