Dexie 4.4 & Dexie Cloud Server 3.0: The Big One

Today we’re shipping Dexie 4.4 and Dexie Cloud Server 3.0. This has been weeks in the making, and it touches nearly every layer of the stack — from how IndexedDB connections are managed at the browser level, to how binaries flow between your app and the cloud, to how your users log in.

Let me walk you through what’s new and why it matters.

A Chromium Collaboration Story

Here’s something that doesn’t happen every day: the Chromium team reached out to us.

Dexie is used in a lot of apps. ChatGPT, WhatsApp Web, GitHub Desktop, Flightradar24 — millions of pages. In the real world, some (a lot) apps dynamically create Dexie instances and never call db.close(). That’s not really how Dexie is supposed to be used but nevertheless — people do it , and it causes so much trouble that it went up om Chromium team radar. It’s not a bug in Dexie - it's just how things play out at scale. But in a browser processing massive amounts of real-world pages, those unclosed references accumulate.

François Doray from the Chromium team ( PR #2254) contributed a fix using FinalizationRegistry - so Dexie instances are now garbage-collected even without an explicit close(). They also added a maxConnections option (default: 1000) as a safety net.

This is exactly how open source should work. Browser vendors seeing a pattern across millions of pages and collaborating upstream to fix it for everyone.

Alongside this, Dexie 4.4 now leverages the IDB 3.0 getAll(options) API that supports bulk load of reverse ordered queries. More efficient key range queries - fewer round trips, faster reads.

Blob Offloading: Binaries That Just Sync

This one’s been on the wishlist for a while. Starting with Dexie 4.4, any Blob, File, or ArrayBuffer ≥ 4 KB is automatically offloaded to cloud storage during sync. Strings larger than 32 KB get the same treatment.

From your app’s perspective, nothing changes! You still store regular Blob and File objects in IndexedDB. The offloading is completely transparent - it happens during sync, not during local writes.

You get two modes:

• 'eager' (default) - blobs are downloaded proactively during sync
• 'lazy' - blobs are fetched on demand when you access them

import Dexie from 'dexie';
import dexieCloud from 'dexie-cloud-addon';

const db = new Dexie('mydb', { addons: [dexieCloud] });
db.version(1).stores({
 attachments: 'id, name'
});

db.cloud.configure({
 databaseUrl: 'https://my-db.dexie.cloud',
 blobMode: 'lazy' // or 'eager' (default)
});

// Store a file - just like before
await db.attachments.add({
 name: 'photo.jpg',
 data: someFileObject // Blob/File >= 4KB auto-offloaded
});

Track progress with db.cloud.blobProgress - it's an observable, so you can wire it into your UI however you like.

Social Auth: One Line to Sign In

This shipped in January, but if you missed it — Dexie Cloud now supports Social Auth with Google, GitHub, Microsoft, Apple, and custom OAuth2 providers.

The server acts as an OAuth broker. Your client app never sees provider tokens — only Dexie Cloud tokens. Configure your providers in manager.dexie.cloud, then:

await db.cloud.login({ provider: 'google' });

That’s it. No redirect handlers, no token juggling, no auth libraries. For local-first apps that previously had to bolt on their own auth layer, this is a genuine unlock.

Streaming Export/Import: Yes, You Can Get Your Data Back

Dexie Cloud Server 3.0 introduces streaming export and import. You can export your entire database as a zip containing:

• data.ndjson - all your structured data
• blobs.dcbl - offloaded binary attachments and large strings
• yjs.dcyj - Yjs collaboration documents

In our legacy CLI, `dexie-cloud export` could only produce a single JSON file and it had to fit in RAM. Didn’t scale for large databases and only contained ordinary data, not Yjs documents.

This is the enterprise data portability answer. “What if we need to leave?” You download a zip. Your data is yours.

The Team Behind This

I should probably mention something about how this all got built.

The Dexie team has been going through a quiet transformation. Alongside the human team — David, Bennie, Jesper — there’s now an AI agent team working in the same Discord, on the same repos:

• Vera —Business Development
• Liz — dev lead
• Tess — QA
• Nova — design and illustrations
• Axel — infrastructure
• Ada — AI research
• Baltazar — innovation and competitive analysis

This isn’t a gimmick or a marketing angle. It’s how we could ship features like blob offloading, social auth, streaming export, and IDB 3.0 support in the span of weeks. The agents handle code, tests, reviews, and illustrations. We humans steer, decide, and keep things honest. We tend to do almost all coding via Liz since some time ago now. Things are really changing. Still we humans are more active now than ever — just that we get things done much faster.

Meet some of our bots on our Discord server. Liz is also helpful with some Github issues if I ask her to.

It’s a new way to build software. Like many others, we’re figuring it out as we go, and it seems to be working very well.

Upgrade Today

The latest release is dexie-cloud-addon@4.4.7, out today. It includes blob offloading, social auth, and everything mentioned above.

npm install dexie@4.4.1 dexie-cloud-addon@4.4.7

If you’re running Dexie Cloud Server on-prem, upgrade to 3.0.x to get streaming export/import and the new E2E test infrastructure.

Docs: dexie.org · GitHub: dexie/Dexie.js · Cloud: dexie.cloud

Dexie 4.4 & Dexie Cloud Server 3.0: The Big One was originally published in Dexie.js on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.