I think what you have said is in many ways very true, a modern web browser is in many ways comparable to an operating system and even more so with Chrome's push into new APIs that do things like access local file systems for example.
It seems that we need a better story for when code inevitably can escape the sandboxing that browsers provide because right now it's a straight up disaster scenario. That means you are going to have to rethink the OS underlying it and none of today's options were built with that kind of a threat model in mind.
There is Fuchsia on the horizon which sounds like a MAJOR leap forward but that also seems like it is several years away from ever reaching a desktop for example and it's also really unclear what kind of attacks are going to be possible in the real world against it either.
Comments
I think what you have said is in many ways very true, a modern web browser is in many ways comparable to an operating system and even more so with Chrome's push into new APIs that do things like access local file systems for example.
It seems that we need a better story for when code inevitably can escape the sandboxing that browsers provide because right now it's a straight up disaster scenario. That means you are going to have to rethink the OS underlying it and none of today's options were built with that kind of a threat model in mind.
There is Fuchsia on the horizon which sounds like a MAJOR leap forward but that also seems like it is several years away from ever reaching a desktop for example and it's also really unclear what kind of attacks are going to be possible in the real world against it either.