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The same is true for operating systems. Why don't they sandbox properly?

We have sandboxing on mobile apps. Why can't we have the same for desktop?

Why can't we have the same for desktop?

Morally? No reason why, and people are working on it (slowly).

Practically? Because sandboxing breaks lots of things that users and developers like, such as file picking (I hate snaps), and it takes time to reimplement them in a sandbox in the way that people expect them to work. If it requires the developers' cooperation, then it's even slower, because developers have enough APIs to learn as it is.

And to the extent you mitigate some of those user complaints (as flatpak etc. are doing) you are basically re-opening the exact same holes that you developed the sandbox to get away from

Asking for fully bug free software is nice but unrealistic. Browsers are ostensibly somewhat sandboxed too but there are always new zero-days 'cause browsers are essentially OSes with many moving parts.

However, it reasonable to expect a single hole to be fixed. The "email hole" has been discussed for decades but here we are.

Email is still the running blood of the internet. While we mostly get away with Slack and others for in-group communication, anything going outside, especially to customers, still goes through emails.

At that scale, expecting a core issue to be quickly (or ever) fixed is just unrealistic. I honestly wonder if fundamentally it will ever be fixed, or if instead we get a different communication path to cover the specific use cases we do care about security.

PS: the phone is now 2 century olds, and we sure couldn't solve scamming issues...

After all these years, Microsoft is finally rolling out win32 app isolation, so maybe we are finally on the good path...

Developers initially revolted against Microsoft UWP and Mac App Store.

Not because they isolated the applications though! Because they were shit, and that's not a requirement.

Walled garden is not a substitute for security

APPX (the installer format used by the windows store) and its successor MSIX contain decent security improvements, including filesystem and registry virtualisation and a capability-based permission system.

After the limited success of the windows store you can now get the same in standalone installers. It has been adopted by approximately nobody

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