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One thing that makes me use a web-app rather than a native one on PC is that I know for a fact that the browser app will be very limited in tampering with my co

One thing that makes me use a web-app rather than a native one on PC is that I know for a fact that the browser app will be very limited in tampering with my computer, something I'm not so sure about when installing native applications. Often I see Nvidia's or Microsoft's or Discord's own services snooping in my installed applications, but it can go much further with, e.g., applications like grammarly that have access to my current buffer and clipboard virtually everywhere. Another example, if I use Discord's web it has no real way of knowing what I'm doing on my PC, but when I used the desktop client, it showed and notified publicly half the world I was on Fortnite (even though, I was trying the Verse programming language in Fortnite's editor) which means that Discord tracks all of my activities on my computer. Thus, honestly, I'd rather choose the web version of most applications 9 times out of 10, I simply have no clue what native applications know, do, and it's hard for me to debug what data they are sending and receiving, something that's quite transparent if I open the dev tools.

jwells89 3y ago
> One thing that makes me use a web-app rather than a native one on PC is that I know for a fact that the browser app will be very limited in tampering with my computer, something I'm not so sure about when installing native applications. I see this as more of a failing on the part of desktop OSes than anything. I know a lot of more technically inclined folks are used to the programs they run having access to all the same things they do and may even prefer that, but it’s been proven countless times over that large commercial devs will abuse this access however they can. It’s because of this that I’m not nearly as upset by things like macOS app sandboxing as some seem to be. It’s nice to have the assurance that these apps can’t poke their noses anywhere that I haven’t explicitly allowed them to. Unfortunately I don’t know when sandboxing will become the norm on the dominant desktop platform (Windows) where it’d make the most positive impact. Sandboxing breaks all sorts of dev assumptions and thus backwards compatibility, which is something of a sacred cow in the Windows world.
- didntcheck 3y ago
  It's a failure of our security model still being based on room-sized machines from half a century ago. There, many users shared the same machine, so protecting them from each others' files was the main focus. But it was assumed that any program run by the user was fully trusted - either they were an expert programmer, or an office worker who had been given a prescribed set of trusted programs for their duties Smartphones have been beneficial as they've shown an alternative model built essentially from a clean slate (their non-original kernels are of little relevance here), proving that a more fine-grained permissions model does work in the "real world" for most "ordinary person" use cases, though advanced users will likely always need to make use of escape hatches at times. And now we have technologies like Flatpak and distributions like Fedora Silverblue which are slowly but surely bringing it to desktop Also for Windows I think the transition can be done. It doesn't need to be a big bang. Imagining something like Flatpak-style isolation, just introduce it as an enterprise feature, requiring explicit enabling by the admin for each program. These first users will therefore be sysadmins who know what they're doing more, and will also see the most benefit of it. Then roll it out for general users, perhaps allowing developers to add their own programs to a default-enable list (incentive to do so undetermined). Then eventually move to a fully opt-out model where you just disable it on problematic programs (and have another list of known ones). And also have a registry flag to globally disable it, for the peace of mind of skeptics
- joshspankit 3y ago
  > I see this as more of a failing on the part of desktop OSes than anything. I agree, and the reasons are ones that I think are also a failing: - Sandboxing is used by OSs to take control back from users (whether that’s stopping them from building their own non-brand system or stopping them from ripping bit-perfect copies of copyright audio) - Proper sandboxing is not implemented because it can be used to circumvent the anti-piracy measures that app developers use (specifically offline-friendly native apps). If all data can be wiped, so can the record of the trial expiration, for example. - The commercial OS makers want a “no one can do it except us” policy and it’s been shown time and time again that any amount of “except us” becomes an attack vector. - Clawing back permissiveness either requires a lot of expensive dev time or breaks older software (or both) and they don’t seem to be prioritizing users when going down that road. And as much as iOS is becoming the standard for how to sandbox apps, did everyone know that iOS apps can communicate with each other (and persist data even after an uninstall) through Safari’s local storage/cookies?
wackget 3y ago
Absolutely. For anything internet-based (social media, chat, meetings etc.) web apps are vastly superior for this reason. In fact, anything which doesn't explicitly need the richness of a true desktop GUI (e.g. Photoshop or games) should probably be a web app. In addition to the massive benefit of running browser-sandboxed, web apps are also: 1. Easier to start and stop (open/close a tab) 2. Less permanent (clear your browser's local storage and no data is left to stagnate on your hard drive) 3. Portable - no installation required 4. Cross-platform by nature of being a website And you're totally right about companies pushing desktop apps because they're more invasive. It's outrageous that a desktop app can access virtually anything on your system in a totally opaque way. Desktop computing needs a massive push towards finely-grained privacy/security controls in a similar way to how browsers work.
- appplication 3y ago
  Even mobile apps have much more finely grained privacy and security controls and sandboxing. It feels like we should have multiple classes of browser apps - consumer apps (Discord, Slack, Spotify, Steam, etc) that are more mobile-like in their explicit permissions and dev tools that carry warnings for their largely unbounded behavior. Or perhaps even have “dev mode” on your machine that opens up access to system processes etc, that is both opt in and timeboxed (I.e. enable dev mode for 8 hours). It’s also weird how I still go to, to me, random websites to download these apps (I trust Spotify.com, but having users google “Spotify” to find an app is ripe for supply chain attacking). The only time I ever visit some of these websites is to download their desktop app. In some sense, gaming has sort of figured this out as most everything comes through one of a handful of platforms nowadays (steam, gog, epic, etc). I’m sure there are lots of solutions here but I think the current state definitely could be significantly improved.
  - sublinear 3y ago
    Centralizing everything into app stores benefits our corporate overlords more than anyone else. It gets even worse when every approved app has to depend on the platform's API. The privacy and security issues still exist, but now developers and users have to pay to for an untrusted app. Web apps don't have any of those problems.
Klonoar 3y ago
I support the idea of using a web app over a native app to avoid tampering, but it’s a bit of a leap to say “Discord tracks all of my activity on my computer”. Typically, that type of game notification is the game reporting it. Games want to have that Discord integration.
ravenstine 3y ago
Frankly, I have more confidence that a web app will actually work, which is why I usually default to them if I can. I can't tell you how many times I've installed an Android app by a big company and it was fundamentally broken in some way. This would happen even if I was using a non-rooted phone, though on my current rooted phone the problem is slightly worse when an app somehow detects that I'm rooted and prevents me from using it. Say what you want about the "clunkiness" of webpages, but I've used tons of native apps that aren't even using webviews that are extremely clunky and slow. The web loads plenty of unneeded crap, but native developers don't seem to give a f*** if their app bundles are half a gigabyte. Maybe it's because they all need to ship AI models now or whatever.
eureka-belief 3y ago
WebAssembly with sandboxing might help with this.

jwells89 3y ago

> One thing that makes me use a web-app rather than a native one on PC is that I know for a fact that the browser app will be very limited in tampering with my computer, something I'm not so sure about when installing native applications. I see this as more of a failing on the part of desktop OSes than anything. I know a lot of more technically inclined folks are used to the programs they run having access to all the same things they do and may even prefer that, but it’s been proven countless times over that large commercial devs will abuse this access however they can. It’s because of this that I’m not nearly as upset by things like macOS app sandboxing as some seem to be. It’s nice to have the assurance that these apps can’t poke their noses anywhere that I haven’t explicitly allowed them to. Unfortunately I don’t know when sandboxing will become the norm on the dominant desktop platform (Windows) where it’d make the most positive impact. Sandboxing breaks all sorts of dev assumptions and thus backwards compatibility, which is something of a sacred cow in the Windows world.

didntcheck 3y ago
It's a failure of our security model still being based on room-sized machines from half a century ago. There, many users shared the same machine, so protecting them from each others' files was the main focus. But it was assumed that any program run by the user was fully trusted - either they were an expert programmer, or an office worker who had been given a prescribed set of trusted programs for their duties Smartphones have been beneficial as they've shown an alternative model built essentially from a clean slate (their non-original kernels are of little relevance here), proving that a more fine-grained permissions model does work in the "real world" for most "ordinary person" use cases, though advanced users will likely always need to make use of escape hatches at times. And now we have technologies like Flatpak and distributions like Fedora Silverblue which are slowly but surely bringing it to desktop Also for Windows I think the transition can be done. It doesn't need to be a big bang. Imagining something like Flatpak-style isolation, just introduce it as an enterprise feature, requiring explicit enabling by the admin for each program. These first users will therefore be sysadmins who know what they're doing more, and will also see the most benefit of it. Then roll it out for general users, perhaps allowing developers to add their own programs to a default-enable list (incentive to do so undetermined). Then eventually move to a fully opt-out model where you just disable it on problematic programs (and have another list of known ones). And also have a registry flag to globally disable it, for the peace of mind of skeptics
joshspankit 3y ago
> I see this as more of a failing on the part of desktop OSes than anything. I agree, and the reasons are ones that I think are also a failing: - Sandboxing is used by OSs to take control back from users (whether that’s stopping them from building their own non-brand system or stopping them from ripping bit-perfect copies of copyright audio) - Proper sandboxing is not implemented because it can be used to circumvent the anti-piracy measures that app developers use (specifically offline-friendly native apps). If all data can be wiped, so can the record of the trial expiration, for example. - The commercial OS makers want a “no one can do it except us” policy and it’s been shown time and time again that any amount of “except us” becomes an attack vector. - Clawing back permissiveness either requires a lot of expensive dev time or breaks older software (or both) and they don’t seem to be prioritizing users when going down that road. And as much as iOS is becoming the standard for how to sandbox apps, did everyone know that iOS apps can communicate with each other (and persist data even after an uninstall) through Safari’s local storage/cookies?

wackget 3y ago

Absolutely. For anything internet-based (social media, chat, meetings etc.) web apps are vastly superior for this reason. In fact, anything which doesn't explicitly need the richness of a true desktop GUI (e.g. Photoshop or games) should probably be a web app. In addition to the massive benefit of running browser-sandboxed, web apps are also: 1. Easier to start and stop (open/close a tab) 2. Less permanent (clear your browser's local storage and no data is left to stagnate on your hard drive) 3. Portable - no installation required 4. Cross-platform by nature of being a website And you're totally right about companies pushing desktop apps because they're more invasive. It's outrageous that a desktop app can access virtually anything on your system in a totally opaque way. Desktop computing needs a massive push towards finely-grained privacy/security controls in a similar way to how browsers work.

appplication 3y ago
Even mobile apps have much more finely grained privacy and security controls and sandboxing. It feels like we should have multiple classes of browser apps - consumer apps (Discord, Slack, Spotify, Steam, etc) that are more mobile-like in their explicit permissions and dev tools that carry warnings for their largely unbounded behavior. Or perhaps even have “dev mode” on your machine that opens up access to system processes etc, that is both opt in and timeboxed (I.e. enable dev mode for 8 hours). It’s also weird how I still go to, to me, random websites to download these apps (I trust Spotify.com, but having users google “Spotify” to find an app is ripe for supply chain attacking). The only time I ever visit some of these websites is to download their desktop app. In some sense, gaming has sort of figured this out as most everything comes through one of a handful of platforms nowadays (steam, gog, epic, etc). I’m sure there are lots of solutions here but I think the current state definitely could be significantly improved.
- sublinear 3y ago
  Centralizing everything into app stores benefits our corporate overlords more than anyone else. It gets even worse when every approved app has to depend on the platform's API. The privacy and security issues still exist, but now developers and users have to pay to for an untrusted app. Web apps don't have any of those problems.

Klonoar 3y ago

I support the idea of using a web app over a native app to avoid tampering, but it’s a bit of a leap to say “Discord tracks all of my activity on my computer”. Typically, that type of game notification is the game reporting it. Games want to have that Discord integration.

ravenstine 3y ago

Frankly, I have more confidence that a web app will actually work, which is why I usually default to them if I can. I can't tell you how many times I've installed an Android app by a big company and it was fundamentally broken in some way. This would happen even if I was using a non-rooted phone, though on my current rooted phone the problem is slightly worse when an app somehow detects that I'm rooted and prevents me from using it. Say what you want about the "clunkiness" of webpages, but I've used tons of native apps that aren't even using webviews that are extremely clunky and slow. The web loads plenty of unneeded crap, but native developers don't seem to give a f*** if their app bundles are half a gigabyte. Maybe it's because they all need to ship AI models now or whatever.

eureka-belief 3y ago

WebAssembly with sandboxing might help with this.