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Comment by flohofwoe

10 years ago

Good luck getting Microsoft, Apple, Google and all the different Linux stakeholders into one boat on that :/ At least in the browser world there are standardisation efforts even if they don't work very well in different places, but it's the closest to the "write once run everywhere" for a platform we ever got. And it is the only remaining open platform where I don't need to enter a 'relationship' with a 'platform owner' to write and publish software for it (edit: except Linux of course).

I would like an OS-level sandbox that doesn't treat its users like idiots. But this is not what's currently happening (especially the "don't treat the user like an idiot" part). iOS and Android have always been closed platforms, and OSX and Windows are currently locked down at high speed.

The browser platform might be a mess, but it's less of a mess than the sum of all the underlying operating systems the browser is running on, and the only open-yet-secure platform that exists.

It doesn't require consensus or standardization. NaCl, for example, runs in userspace on several platforms. If you had a sandbox that supported all of the necessary features, you could compile any open source browser for it easily (or as easily as compiling a browser can be).

I actually don't care for the browser as anything more than interactive documents, so I am really looking forward to the Apple, Google and Microsoft efforts in sandboxing.

Specially in the way that they are also moving away from C as well.

  • Since that puts you in a small minority, I rather doubt that whatever they come up with will be well suited to your needs.