Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The browser is the sandbox

aifoc.us

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 202 posts

Re: The browser is the sandbox

#61

Post by curtisblaine »

anilgulecha wrote: post #56

I'd like to point Simon and others to 2 more things possible in the browser: 1) webcontainer allows nodejs frontend and backend apps to be run in the browser. this is readily demonstrated to (now sadly unmaintained) bolt.diy project. 2) jslinux and x86 linux examples allow running of complete linux env in wasm, and 2 way communication. A thin extension adds networking support to Linux. so technically it's theoretical…

> 1) webcontainer

Isn't webcontainers.io a proprietary, non-open source solution with paid plans? Mentioning it at the same level of open source, auditable platforms seems really strange to me.

Re: The browser is the sandbox

#62

Post by mejutoco »

lukan wrote: post #54
chime wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Sidenote: Flash's scripting language, ActionScript is also directly responsible for the generational design of Java-ahem-ECMAScript later on, also TypeScript too. I feel like I am the only one who absolutely loved ActionScript, especially AS3. I wrote a video aggregator (chime.tv[1]) back in the day using AS3 and it was such a fun experience. 1. https://techcrunch.com/2007/06/12/chimetv-a-prettier-way-to-...

How did you got that impression? There is the universal hate for flash because it was used for ads and had shitty security, but anyone I know who actually used AS3 loved it. At its peak, with flex builder, we also had a full blown UI Editor, where you could just add your own custom elements designed directly with flash ... and then it was all killed because Apple did not dare to open source it, or put serious efforts…

It was also leaking memory, which made it very unsuitable for anything long running (like long-running screen displays, ask me how I know).

Re: The browser is the sandbox

#63

Post by curtisblaine »

lewisjoe wrote: post #57

It's fascinating that browsers are one of the most robust and widely available sandboxing system and we are yet to make a claude-code/gemini-cli like agent that runs inside the browser. Browsers as agent environment opens up a ton of exciting possibilities. For example, agents now have an instant way to offer UIs based on tech governed by standards(HTML/CSS) instead of platform specific UI bindings. A way to run thir…

> It's fascinating that browsers are one of the most robust and widely available sandboxing system and we are yet to make a claude-code/gemini-cli like agent that runs inside the browser.

It's easily explained by the fact that all the javascript code is exposed in a browser and all the network connections are trivially inspectable and blockable. It's much harder to collect data and do shady things with that level of inspectability. And it's much harder to ban alternative clients for the main paid offer. Especially if AI companies want to leave the door open to pushing ads to your conversations.

Re: The browser is the sandbox

#64

Post by tlarkworthy »

lewisjoe wrote: post #57

It's fascinating that browsers are one of the most robust and widely available sandboxing system and we are yet to make a claude-code/gemini-cli like agent that runs inside the browser. Browsers as agent environment opens up a ton of exciting possibilities. For example, agents now have an instant way to offer UIs based on tech governed by standards(HTML/CSS) instead of platform specific UI bindings. A way to run thir…

I have a pretty good one here https://observablehq.com/@tomlarkworthy/robocoop-2 and I have a port of opencode in-progress

Re: The browser is the sandbox

#65

Post by vbezhenar »

viraptor wrote: post #58
vbezhenar wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Linux kernel is ridden with local privilege escalation vulnerabilities. This approach works for trusted software that you just want to contain, but it won't work for malicious software.

Ridden? There are issues from time to time, but it's not like you can grab the latest, patched Ubuntu LTS and escalate from an unprivileged seccomp sandbox that doesn't include crazy device files.

Any sandbox technology works fine until it isn't. It's not like you could escape Java sandbox, but Java applets were removed from the browsers due to issues being found regularly. In the end, browser sandbox is one of the few that billions of people use and run arbitrary code there every day, without even understanding that. The only comparable technology is qemu. I don't think there are many hosters who will hand off user account to a shared server and let you go wild there.

Re: The browser is the sandbox

#67

Post by viraptor »

vbezhenar wrote: post #65
viraptor wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ridden? There are issues from time to time, but it's not like you can grab the latest, patched Ubuntu LTS and escalate from an unprivileged seccomp sandbox that doesn't include crazy device files.

Any sandbox technology works fine until it isn't. It's not like you could escape Java sandbox, but Java applets were removed from the browsers due to issues being found regularly. In the end, browser sandbox is one of the few that billions of people use and run arbitrary code there every day, without even understanding that. The only comparable technology is qemu. I don't think there are many hosters who will hand of…

> Any sandbox technology works fine until it isn't.

Tautology is tautology.

> but Java applets were removed from the browsers

Java applets provided more scope compared to the browser itself, not less. They're not really comparable to seccomp or namespaces.

> hosters who will hand off user account to a shared server

There's lots of CI or function runners that expose docker-like environments.

Re: The browser is the sandbox

#68

Post by anilgulecha »

simonw wrote: post #59
anilgulecha wrote: post #56

I'd like to point Simon and others to 2 more things possible in the browser: 1) webcontainer allows nodejs frontend and backend apps to be run in the browser. this is readily demonstrated to (now sadly unmaintained) bolt.diy project. 2) jslinux and x86 linux examples allow running of complete linux env in wasm, and 2 way communication. A thin extension adds networking support to Linux. so technically it's theoretical…

I have a very minimal v86 experiment here: https://tools.simonwillison.net/v86 My eventual goal with that is to expand it so an LLM can treat it like a filesystem and execution environment and do Claude Code style tricks with it, but it's not particularly easy to programmatically run shell commands via v86 - it seems to be designed more for presenting a Linux environment in an interactive UI in a browser. It's likely…

On the second tab (which is a text/browser interface to the VM) here: https://copy.sh/v86/?profile=buildroot , you can start sh shell, and run arbitrary commands, and see output. making a programmatic i/o stream is left as an exercise (to claude perhaps :).

Re: The browser is the sandbox

#69

Post by anilgulecha »

curtisblaine wrote: post #61
anilgulecha wrote: post #56

I'd like to point Simon and others to 2 more things possible in the browser: 1) webcontainer allows nodejs frontend and backend apps to be run in the browser. this is readily demonstrated to (now sadly unmaintained) bolt.diy project. 2) jslinux and x86 linux examples allow running of complete linux env in wasm, and 2 way communication. A thin extension adds networking support to Linux. so technically it's theoretical…

> 1) webcontainer Isn't webcontainers.io a proprietary, non-open source solution with paid plans? Mentioning it at the same level of open source, auditable platforms seems really strange to me.

Technically, it runs on Chrome, so making an open source version is viable. then bolt.diy project was giving opencontainers a shot, which is a partial implementation of the same. But broadly, if this method works, then FOSS equivalent is not a worry, should come soon enough.

Re: The browser is the sandbox

#70

Post by bob1029 »

Tarq0n wrote: post #51
bob1029 wrote: post #39

> a robust sandbox for agents to operate in I would like to humbly propose that we simply provision another computer for the agent to use. I don't know why this needs to be complicated. A nano EC2 instance is like $5/m. I suspect many of us currently have the means to do this on prem without resorting to virtualization.

An EC2 instance is a sandbox within a large server, so that's not really reframing the issue.

It's effectively the same thing as a separate computer because it's not your problem if the sandbox becomes broken. It's not your responsibility to maintain its integrity.
Post reply on HN