The browser is the sandbox

A sandbox is meant to be a controlled environment where you can execute code safely. Browsers can access your email, banking, commerce and the keys to your digital life.

Browsers are closer to operating systems rather than sandboxes, so giving access of any kind to an agent seems dangerous. In the post I can see it's talking about the file access API, perhaps a better phrasing is, the browser has a sandbox?

I stand by a policy that if a feature in one of my projects can only be implemented in Chrome, it's better not to add the feature at all; the same is true for features which would be exclusive to Firefox. Giving users of a specific browser a superior experience encourages a dangerous browser monoculture.

just make a separate user profile without your email , banking, and commerce, if that's what you don't want it to have access to.

> Over the last 30 years, we have built a sandbox specifically designed to run incredibly hostile, untrusted code from anywhere on the web

Browser sandboxes are swiss cheese. In 2024 alone, Google reported 75 zero-day exploits that break out of their browser's sandbox.

Browsers are the worst security paradigm. They have tens of millions of lines of code, far more than operating system kernels. The more lines of code, the more bugs. They include features you don't need, with no easy way to disable them or opt-in on a case-by-case basis. The more features, the more an attacker can chain them into a usable attack. It's a smorgasbord of attack surface. The ease with which the sandbox gets defeated every year is proof.

So why is everyone always using browsers, anyway? Because they mutated into an application platform that's easy to use and easy to deploy. But it's a dysfunctional one. You can't download and verify the application via signature, like every other OS's application platform. There's no published, vetted list of needed permissions. The "stack" consists of a mess of RPC calls to random remote hosts, often hundreds if not thousands required to render a single page. If any one of them gets compromised, or is just misconfigured, in any number of ways, so does the entire browser and everything it touches. Oh, and all the security is tied up in 350 different organizations (CAs) around the world, which if any are compromised, there goes all the security. But don't worry, Google and Apple are hard at work to control them (which they can do, because they control the application platform) to give them more control over us.

This isn't secure, and there's really no way to secure it. And Google knows that. But it's the instrument making them hundreds of billions of dollars.

This assumes people know more than just writing Dockerfiles and push straight to production. This is still a rarity.