71–80 of 115 posts
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You could set the whole directory tree to no-execute via ACLs. Anyway, more interoperability with the native environment is a good thing. Right now browsers are an alien implant in every operating system that can't communicate with anything else.
Do ACLs exist in Windows? I suppose you could just forbid the .exe extension to be used, but that doesn't seem like a very foolproof system.
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And more than that, I honestly wonder about the motives of an advertising driven company these days. It feels like 5 years later this will come to bite us in the ass as another way of exploiting access to our computer and data. What if websites start requiring specific files to exist before allowing access?
> What if websites start requiring specific files to exist before allowing access? This isn't just unrestricted filesystem access. The site would need to request file system permission first, _and_ get the user to select the file in a file picker. In short, that's not a serious concern.
Suppose an app which does not really needs file permission to work, like Facebook, but asks anyhow. If you opt out, you cannot access the app.
That pattern does not need to exist.
If you could write an executable file, you could make a compiler in browser JS.
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Approximation is not what it's about. It's about integration. Write that google doc and store it as a local .docx or .odc. Edit that 20 MB raw picture in a browser app and store it back to the disk, instantly, then feed it to a traditional desktop editor. Write that Python script in a Web IDE, store locally, and upload it to an Arduino.
All those use cases and more can be accomplished if the Write API is limited to a sandboxed local storage with a configurable size limit per domain. I would hate to see all the gains made by sandboxing the browser fly away by allowing it to access any file on the user's system.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> What if websites start requiring specific files to exist before allowing access? This isn't just unrestricted filesystem access. The site would need to request file system permission first, _and_ get the user to select the file in a file picker. In short, that's not a serious concern.
Not parent, but I think you are missing the point parent is making. Suppose an app which does not really needs file permission to work, like Facebook, but asks anyhow. If you opt out, you cannot access the app. That pattern does not need to exist.
A couple months ago I started studying PWA. I realized PWA's potential was on Desktop and not really on mobile. I came to realize that PWA missed really two things to change Desktop for good : - Sandboxed FileSystem API - Standard Operating System Support Most apps like Slack, Discord or Twitch can barely justify their usage of Electron... beside the possibility to have those apps in a separate OS Window they don't m…
A couple months ago I started studying PWA. I realized PWA's potential was on Desktop and not really on mobile. I came to realize that PWA missed really two things to change Desktop for good : - Sandboxed FileSystem API - Standard Operating System Support Most apps like Slack, Discord or Twitch can barely justify their usage of Electron... beside the possibility to have those apps in a separate OS Window they don't m…
1. If when you ran a .net application all .net applications shared the same parent process that'd be a significant problem.
2. Many electron clients control their versions because there are bugs, quirks, removal of features, or other changes in chromium versions. Discord last time I checked is still on 56.
3. PWA's do not have native access. Discord requires that to spawn IPC communications with game overalys, which are another native process.
PWA's are meant more for mobile, but even there you are of course, limited.
Firefox and Safari would change the world if they actually cared about doing that. They're about market share, not about the technology anymore. Firefox was in a position of making it possible to simply ship the firefox binary, and you could add your js and css changes, effectively having the full firefox browser as your 'app'. Which means it could be triggered to auto-update like normal firefox, but still have your UI and act as a browser.
Firefox abandoned that route and instead is focusing upon whatever Chrome impliments, like Custom Components. Safari also doesn't care about anything but linux and mac.
I’m wondering how useful it is to save files on the local filesystem in 2018. I can understand syncing Google Drive and saving stuff there. Or Resilio Sync or any number of other solutions such as Dat. You Already have filepickers to open and read files. And you can save files as I indicated - via syncing to a service, where you have control of what goes where and it’s still there if you lose the device. And it can b…
One of the great things about browsers is the way you can trust them to be reasonably sandboxed from the rest of your machine. Features like this chip away at that trust model and open up new attack vectors against unsuspecting users. I get the usability benefits, but the security implications are scary. How easy would it be to trick my mother into uploading her profile picture and have the site change that file into…
As you surely noticed, for last 10 years the browser is actively trying to replace your desktop OS, so that the browser would become the platform, instead of Windows / macOS / Linux / anything else. Imagine the desktop becoming ChromeOS on any computer, not just Chromebooks. For this, the browser must make all the traditional OS interfaces available. It has interfaces for accelerated 2D and 3D graphics, audio, USB, p…
Nah, replacing the desktop OS has been the goal of browser-makers since the founding of Netscape nearly 25 years ago.