Google Drive OAuth Flow - Fails With No Clear Error

[jlewi]

Sharing AISRE links and having them open is going to be people's first interaction with the notebook

• We need to really nail this UX

Right now it often fails because pop-ups are blocked so the Google Drive File Can't be loaded.

• The user doesn't get an obvious error they just see a blank screen
• There's no obvious way for them to "reload" the doc after triggering the Auth flow.

What should the UX be?

• You click the link ->
  • Tab for the file should show an error about Drive Credentials can't be obtained preventing the read

How do we implement this?

• If we don't have Drive Credentials; we can't load information about the folder or file so we can't check if its folder is in the folder?
• Should we store it in IndexedDB?

It would be nice to start automate manual testing using playwright or maybe AgentBrowser
https://github.com/vercel-labs/agent-browser

[jlewi]

Right now we are using Google's Implicit Auth Flow.

Drive tokens expire after 1 Hour. So if we want to implement auto save our options are

1. Store a refresh token accessible to JS which is higher risk
2. Use the implicit flow which periodically asks the user to reauth.

I think the alternative would be to

1. Only store the access token
2. Pause periodic saves when access token expires
3. Automatically trigger the auth flow when user takes an action requiring a token (e.g. opening a file) or explicitly sync'ing files.

Right now pop-ups are a bigger source of friction than lack of automatic saving so maybe we should get rid of the implicit flow and switch to the PKCE flow without a refresh token by default.

Maybe we optionally allow people to request a refresh token if they want to do automatic saving.

I'm unclear about whether the implicit grant flow can work without popups. I suspect not because I think the whole point is it periodically interrupts you to refresh your credential and I think it would be annoying if you were working and you suddenly got redirected away.