Why the Mac App Sandbox makes me sad

In general, this type of sandbox is a Good Thing. I would love to live in a world where the default environment for any program is a very limited sandbox that can only interact with the outside world via standardized UI elements. That is, outside a data store specific to the application, it can only access files via the standard dialogs, and so forth.

The potential for malware distribution would be significantly reduced in such a world, because yes, there will always be stupid users, but you cannot blame all the stupidity on the user.

Even I as a power user would like to try out little programs that I find on the internet - and that includes small games and screensavers, which are cliche carriers of malware. Yet I simply cannot safely try them out without an exorbitant amount of work. Having a proper sandbox environment as de facto standard outside of web browsers would be awesome.

That said, it absolutely sucks that Apple combines an idea that is a Good Thing in principle with idiotic policies - if it is indeed true what the article claims.

> That's fine. Ironically, now Linux and Windows (and anything else that comes up down the line) will have to serve as the 'Computer for the rest of us'

I'm expecting Windows to move towards a more sandboxed experience as well, at least for Metro/WinRT. I know Miguel de Icaza also hopes for broad sandboxing support by default.

Regarding TFA, he does not make much of a case against sandboxing (applications not being able to write wherever the hell they want without warning the user counts as a positive in my book), and his final quote (of Tim Bray) is relevant to appstores, but it has no relevance whatsoever to sandboxing. Not impressed. Even the plugins stuff has limited relevance in the grand scheme of things, it will affect some applications for non-technical users (more technically oriented ones will likely be able to put their plugins where they know they should be).

We don't know that much about the Mac App Store sandboxing yet, it could be perfectly benign. This is mostly a bunch of conjuring of ominous fantasies.

> I'm expecting Windows to move towards a more sandboxed experience as well

It already does to some extent.

Internet Explorer was the first to introduce it (to my now out of date understanding), and it's since expanded to other products including shipped Windows apps, Office, etc.

It happens invisibly for the developer, if you think the registry that you access is THE registry then you're wrong. It's a proxy that you access, and the proxy has a view on what you will see or not.

An example mention of this is here (one of the first Google hits): http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/access-help/enable-or-disa...

Basically, you the user get the choice, but by default your apps, the things they open, are all sandboxed and protected. For compatibility reasons you can currently choose to override this, but as you might expect group policy can be used to disable someone's ability to lower their security.

One possible strategy may be to offer a 'limited' version of your app that is compatible with the Sandbox constraints for a low price. When a user tries to do something that is not possible due to the constraints, you can inform them that the pro-version (not installed through the app-store) can eliminate this and other inconveniences.

If you are worried about destroying the market value of your app, then just charge full price on the app store and allow customer's to 'upgrade' to the unconstrained version.

This is far from ideal as it incurs lot's of overhead by maintaining two versions and extra work for the customer, but it will probably be worth it to stay on the App store.