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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 - con

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.
- MiguelX413 3y ago
  Neither do Linux distros
nasso_dev 3y ago
maybe wasm+wasi(x) would allow us to build an open "app store" platform or a sort of package manager for desktop apps? it could provide a cross platform, sandboxed alternative to Shipping Chromium, while still supporting web technologies to build the GUI (powered by the system's native web view?) i dont like having a centralized platform but i guess we could establish a standard file format (like .deb or AppImage?) or have a federated platform? i really know very little about all this though...

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.

MiguelX413 3y ago
Neither do Linux distros

nasso_dev 3y ago

maybe wasm+wasi(x) would allow us to build an open "app store" platform or a sort of package manager for desktop apps? it could provide a cross platform, sandboxed alternative to Shipping Chromium, while still supporting web technologies to build the GUI (powered by the system's native web view?) i dont like having a centralized platform but i guess we could establish a standard file format (like .deb or AppImage?) or have a federated platform? i really know very little about all this though...