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I'd be more sympathetic to this statement if any of the modern operating systems had halfway decent sandboxing. Insert inevitable reference to "the Birth and D

I'd be more sympathetic to this statement if any of the modern operating systems had halfway decent sandboxing. Insert inevitable reference to "the Birth and Death of Javascript" but native platforms should be copying the web more in general. The DOM is just structured CLI output, with all of the advantages that CLIs have. Seriously, as a user nearly every native app on my machine ought to (in a better world) be rendering its interface to a structured text format that I can inspect and modify on the fly and pipe into other applications or dynamically restyle as I see fit. Because of that structure, most web-apps can be extended arbitrarily with user extensions. The sandboxing on the web is... okay it's not great, but it's better than what anybody else is doing. The delivery platform for apps is better specifically because the sandboxing is better, which allows me to try out apps quickly without giving them a lot of unnecessary access to my computer. People are building apps in the browser because browsers offer capabilities that native operating systems don't offer. The few platforms where browser dominance doesn't hold true (iOS, Android) largely maintain native dominance by severely limiting what web browsers can do. That's the wrong way to move forward; offer a native experience that's as good as the web and people won't need to build apps on the web. Even just good application sandboxing alone would be a good start, and yet whenever something like Flatpak tries to make progress in that direction, people are constantly complaining about it and explaining that sandboxing is the wrong way to approach app security. It's not really surprising then that people look at that discussion and take away from it that maybe the desktop isn't a good fit for their app. ---- My only critique of the webGPU direction is people bypassing the DOM, which... is usually the result of native developers and native frameworks trying to bring native development patterns to the web instead of rallying behind the idea of user-inspectable pure-text interfaces in the DOM. In that regard, and very specifically in that regard, I do kind of agree that the web is becoming too much like a native operating system. In the sense that it is repeating the same exact mistakes that native operating systems made. But in regards to people just generally building apps in browsers... good. Honestly, progressive web apps are a safer, more user-respecting way to deliver functionality than native OSes are.

shortrounddev 4y ago
> if any of the modern operating systems had halfway decent sandboxing What qualifies as "halfway decent"? For servers, Linux seems to have a good set of utilities (taken advantage of by docker). Windows doesn't seem to have as good system calls (like chroot, for example), but UWP apps seem to be decent enough for a sandboxed app. What would be a good example of sandboxing for you? Personally I think that websites are the most popular way to distribute applications because it only requires a single link or URL to download the software and have it run immediately as required. No other cross-platform computing VM (JVM, CLR) can boast about that kind of ease of distribution. Additionally, HTML + CSS + JS have proven to be the most popular UI platforms. XAML just doesn't come close to the flexibility provided by these tools, and non-declarative UI is just out of the question for the majority of people designing websites in HTML, who are not software engineers
- danShumway 4y ago
  > because it only requires a single link or URL to download the software and have it run immediately as required Agreed, but I would argue that the only reason why it's possible to have a single URL to download and run the software is because there's decent sandboxing. Linux does have some decent security utilities, but it's only recently that they're starting to show up in non-developer contexts for everyday apps (basically Wayland, Flatpak, Bubblewrap, all of which have experienced pushback from the community) -- and while I fully approve of that effort, it's not anywhere close to the level of security yet that the web offers. I would say that if you would feel comfortable with a native app installation workflow that worked exactly the same as the modern web's app delivery mechanism (ie, you can click on a link and a native app that has never been pre-vetted or moderated is installed and launches on your computer without any confirmation and without taking you to a store page), then... that's halfway decent sandboxing. The first bar to clear is "do I feel comfortable running arbitrary untrusted code that has never been validated by anyone?" The second couple of followup tests that the web itself struggles with is stuff like "is this spying on me, is this fingerprinting my computer, how easy is it for this thing to phish me?" To me, that would be when we start to move pass halfway decent sandboxing to "good" sandboxing. I'm not sure the web deserves that label. But I don't know of any native platforms that pass even that first bar where I would feel comfortable running malicious code on the system. I mean, sure, you can set up VMs and Firejail and I could if I wanted to set up a Linux system that had good sandboxing -- but none of that stuff is accessible to your average user; it's security for the very few people who know how to set up that security. Meanwhile, the web is security for every single person with a web browser on every single one of their devices. Arguably mobile phones have started getting closer, but Apple is still claiming that the reason they can't open up their app store is because it would be insecure, so if we take them at face value they don't believe that their sandboxing is good enough to allow for untrusted code execution. And I'm hoping that eventually the combination of Wayland and Flatpak turns into decent universal sandboxing on Linux for every app the user is running on every distro, but we've still got a long way to go. > Additionally, HTML + CSS + JS have proven to be the most popular UI platforms This is certainly part of it, but... people write JS that don't like JS. I don't think it's a good enough explanation on its own. But just opinion me, I don't have strong opinions about that.

shortrounddev 4y ago

> if any of the modern operating systems had halfway decent sandboxing What qualifies as "halfway decent"? For servers, Linux seems to have a good set of utilities (taken advantage of by docker). Windows doesn't seem to have as good system calls (like chroot, for example), but UWP apps seem to be decent enough for a sandboxed app. What would be a good example of sandboxing for you? Personally I think that websites are the most popular way to distribute applications because it only requires a single link or URL to download the software and have it run immediately as required. No other cross-platform computing VM (JVM, CLR) can boast about that kind of ease of distribution. Additionally, HTML + CSS + JS have proven to be the most popular UI platforms. XAML just doesn't come close to the flexibility provided by these tools, and non-declarative UI is just out of the question for the majority of people designing websites in HTML, who are not software engineers

danShumway 4y ago
> because it only requires a single link or URL to download the software and have it run immediately as required Agreed, but I would argue that the only reason why it's possible to have a single URL to download and run the software is because there's decent sandboxing. Linux does have some decent security utilities, but it's only recently that they're starting to show up in non-developer contexts for everyday apps (basically Wayland, Flatpak, Bubblewrap, all of which have experienced pushback from the community) -- and while I fully approve of that effort, it's not anywhere close to the level of security yet that the web offers. I would say that if you would feel comfortable with a native app installation workflow that worked exactly the same as the modern web's app delivery mechanism (ie, you can click on a link and a native app that has never been pre-vetted or moderated is installed and launches on your computer without any confirmation and without taking you to a store page), then... that's halfway decent sandboxing. The first bar to clear is "do I feel comfortable running arbitrary untrusted code that has never been validated by anyone?" The second couple of followup tests that the web itself struggles with is stuff like "is this spying on me, is this fingerprinting my computer, how easy is it for this thing to phish me?" To me, that would be when we start to move pass halfway decent sandboxing to "good" sandboxing. I'm not sure the web deserves that label. But I don't know of any native platforms that pass even that first bar where I would feel comfortable running malicious code on the system. I mean, sure, you can set up VMs and Firejail and I could if I wanted to set up a Linux system that had good sandboxing -- but none of that stuff is accessible to your average user; it's security for the very few people who know how to set up that security. Meanwhile, the web is security for every single person with a web browser on every single one of their devices. Arguably mobile phones have started getting closer, but Apple is still claiming that the reason they can't open up their app store is because it would be insecure, so if we take them at face value they don't believe that their sandboxing is good enough to allow for untrusted code execution. And I'm hoping that eventually the combination of Wayland and Flatpak turns into decent universal sandboxing on Linux for every app the user is running on every distro, but we've still got a long way to go. > Additionally, HTML + CSS + JS have proven to be the most popular UI platforms This is certainly part of it, but... people write JS that don't like JS. I don't think it's a good enough explanation on its own. But just opinion me, I don't have strong opinions about that.