The DOJ still wants Google to sell off Chrome

I would love to have that in my OS. But, let me know what browser you think that is. It's not Firefox, nor Chrome, and certainly not Edge.

> Please by all means suggest an established sandboxing technology that applications use that already does that.

Linux cgroups is an established sandboxing technology. It has the potential to do what you want but currently needs more work to make it simple.

Applications don't use it to the extent that they should.

> why should I bother when I already have one that does what I want and that applications actually use?

Because browsers don't do what you want. Browsers have been subverted to no longer be user agents. Browsers don't reject HTTPS requests that aren't in the best interests of users. You have to install extensions to get that. If you have to customize your "user agent" then I suggest that customization belongs at the OS level. Otherwise, for example, in the case of Windows or macOS, you're just running someone else's game and the browser is merely a veneer.

> When I run other people's applications, I want them to either be Open Source or I want them to stay confined to a browser tab.

I want more restriction than a browser tab. I want more restriction than browsers are going. I want this in the OS and the reason it doesn't yet exist is because there are so many web developers who build terrible web apps instead of learning computer science to build a (terrible) native application and ask for the same restrictions in the OS instead of a browser.

Access to store and retrieve user credentials? No. I want to run multiple instances of the same app without every app seeing all of the credentials. I want a separate password manager that lets me choose when or where to provide credentials.

Access to store things on my computer [0]? No thanks at all. If you're running in a browser, you should be lightweight. You should eat the storage expenses for your app and you should minimize your app's size to minimize your network transfer costs. I have very limited storage space, limited write endurance, and web apps waste both.

Run stuff in the background [1]? No. Run your compute on your own hardware. Power is expensive and that web app running whatever it's running is making my whole system slow down. Ten different tabs, for six different apps, all thinking they can run whatever the hell they want, and leaves very little available for me to actually get work done.

Access to my GPU [2]? Dude, no. I have a slow GPU and that crappy web app is slowing everything down while eating both main memory and also GPU memory. And who knows what kind of security isolation GPUs have these days (protip: none)!

Access to my USB devices [3]? No friggen thanks. That slow hard disk? It's USB. And that USB bus? Yeah it's slow too. And what a security nightmare: that's where my USB-to-ethernet adapter is, on the same slow bus!

Microphone? Camera? System notifications? No, no, no [4].

I want what you want, but I want it at the OS level. Without OS-level control, that web app isolation makes everything worse.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_storage

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_worker

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebGPU

[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebUSB

[4]: I got lazy and stopped looking for more web APIs for you

I’d prefer a static list for those people.

I could write a book on the crazy stuff he has done to his iOS devices. I’ve contemplated putting “child mode” or whatever on his account to prevent him from changing settings or installing apps.

My favorite so far was a malware VPN that was harvesting ALL of his traffic.

If everyone is jumping off a cliff, would you too?

Slack: downloads 500+ megabytes of trash and stores it on your computer. It also is dogshit slow to load conversations. It used to have a bunch of really neat integrations, and then they did the rug-pull for chat history, APIs, and other costs. It's going on momentum now but most businesses and gamers have moved off of it. Its calling feature simply refuses work on Firefox on Linux for no technical reason whatsoever.

Zoom: barely works in a browser tab, and the app receives updates daily, and still has broken user experiences. Chat is barely functional, and screen sharing breaks often. Little or no useful API or integrations. Terrible user experience. But the configuration is probably the best of the apps you cite.

Skype: Microsoft killed this a decade ago, I don't know why you'd bring it up.

Discord: well at least they have best-in-class user experience for gaming voice comms. Up until you have too many people, at which point... good luck getting your whole gaming group together. There's a huge cult for bots and integrations, but I fear its messages will go the way of Slack -- pay for (or otherwise encumber) old/large message histories. It's terribly organized, and doesn't like running more than one client or window at a time, so it's a really terrible user experience for power users -- and it's very hostile to running a third party client to improve that. It's pretty bloated for the capabilities it has (better than Slack though), but it is packaged fairly well (very easy to install or update the Electron app) and integrates into things like Slack used to.

> most performant (Figma)

Figma is performant? Figma is dog slow compared to what functionality it provides. Apps ran faster on Mac OS 9 with a 275MHz PPC processor 30 years ago that do pretty much the same thing that Figma does today.

> Only way I'd have a take like yours is if I was a native dev, and my job security relied on companies hiring 3 people to lead 3 teams for 3 codebases (Web, Android, iOS native) - rather than 1 team and 1 codebase for all 3. I'd dishonestly dismiss the notion of cross-platform programming only out of self-preservation, and not any semblance of pragmatism.

That's a typical thought for someone who's acting on the defensive and hates computer science. Maybe you should change careers into middle management or executives, you seem the type. Or maybe you might want to cut back on personal attacks because there's plenty of pragmatism in wanting native applications if you'd look past your own short-sighted career-driven opinion.

If you don't want to handle the unique benefits that each platforms give then you don't need 3 teams.

Writing for web and Android and iOS native isn't what I'm arguing for, and you're moving the goalpost by trying to change it to that. Native apps have way better performance than web apps there, but they're still put into user-hostile walled gardens. You want pragmatism? Focus on why I want native apps on my desktop platform, discussed in the sibling fork of this comment thread.

I'm extremely familiar with cgroups, and no, it really doesn't have anything remotely suitable for interposing application UI elements, nor is it a good fit for intercepting HTTPS requests unless you're prepared to run a proxy that MITMs all requests and you overcome the certificate pinning many applications do. (And the most obvious ways of doing that tend to lower security.)

Browsers are a nearly unique environment in this regard, in which myriad applications are built to let the environment (the browser) handle both the network access and the UI rendering for them. It is a path-dependent marvel of history that we have such a popular platform that gives as much control to users as it does.

> You have to install extensions to get that.

And the Linux kernel alone doesn't do what you want either, you need userspace frameworks for that. The browser provides the necessary APIs to intercept requests, and extensions use those to implement all sorts of useful functionality. "You need an extension" is not a counterargument when the extensions already exist and other frameworks need the equivalent as well.

> If you have to customize your "user agent" then I suggest that customization belongs at the OS level.

As mentioned above, OS sandboxing is substantially worse than browser sandboxing for the purposes I care about, and does not solve the problems I have. In a browser, both the UI and the network access is handled by a user-agent that can be adversarial to the application.

Oh, and the best up-and-coming solution that offers anywhere close to the same thing? WebAssembly components running outside the browser, where you can say to a component "I won't give you raw network access, but if you hand me network requests I'll hand you results".

> in the case of Windows or macOS, you're just running someone else's game

You'll get no argument from me on that point. But that doesn't hold for an Open Source OS and browser.

> I want this in the OS and the reason it doesn't yet exist is because there are so many web developers who build terrible web apps instead of learning computer science to build a (terrible) native application and ask for the same restrictions in the OS instead of a browser.

People who have different preferences and values than you do are not stupid. People who don't care about the windmill you've chosen to tilt at are not ignorant.

Capability systems have been researched and developed for decades, in many different forms. They could, in theory, be used to solve the problem you care about, given sufficient capabilities and substantially different application design to integrate such capabilities. That has both practical implementation challenges nearly on par with "write a new OS" or "write a new web browser", and also has practical adoption challenges of convincing people to write applications for it when many native applications are trying to get more capabilities that the user may not want them to have.

Despite all that, there are people working on many aspects of that problem. The fact that people don't immediately go "let me drop everything I care about that works for me and prioritize working on your approach" suggests that you either need to do more work on developing it yourself (because nobody will ever care about your exact preferences more than you do yourself) or learn to pitch it to people who don't already agree with you.

> I want what you want, but I want it at the OS level.

See the previous paragraph: Feel free to write it then. When you've built something that's anywhere close to the capabilities of a web browser, I look forward to trying it, and I'm sure many other people will too. I hope you succeed.