Chrome: Closing the capability gap between the web and native | Hacker News Reader

Chrome: Closing the capability gap between the web and native

developers.google.com

30 pointsfeross8 comments

It kinda surprises me that Google is the one to jump on this rather than Mozilla given that Mozilla has already implemented version of a lot of these APIs (at least the mobile-related ones) as part of FirefoxOS. I guess maybe not having that skin in the game anymore prevented those APIs from becoming standardized?

But these are also very useful for desktop applications. Anyways, this is a great initiative, it's about time a real effort was made to close that gap.

Anyways, this is a great initiative, it's about time a real effort was made to close that gap.

That's actually debatable. Arguably moving more of this stuff into the browser is just digging us deeper and deeper into the "browser as a poor man's operating system" hole, and creating more of a "we have an OS running on top of an OS" scenario. It might well make more sense for the browser to just browse and then hand content which needs these capabilities off to native code that implements them.

Someday it's just going to be browsers all the way down.

And I'll be sad.

Browsers are filling a need that OSes have ignored. If you are against browsers, you should work on a zero-install native code sandbox that's actually secure enough to contain completely untrusted code (not relying on walled-garden app store verification procedures) while still providing important features like hardware 3D graphics and video decoding acceleration, camera access, etc.

There's a decent argument that current desktop OSes are a poor man's OS. The permissive-by-default approach of traditional OSes is deeply problematic and attempts at reigning that in (Mac App store sandbox, capabilities work on *nix) have largely failed to gain any traction.

It's certainly not elegant that we build a proper security model from within a browser rather than an OS, but it might be the only practical approach (short of some large-scale migration to iOS/Android/Fuschia etc, which seems...unlikely.)

> There's a decent argument that current desktop OSes are a poor man's OS. The permissive-by-default approach of traditional OSes is deeply problematic and attempts at reigning that in (Mac App store sandbox, capabilities work on *nix) have largely failed to gain any traction.

What if they've failed because they're a poor idea that damage the reason why computers have become an ubiquitous tool and drivers of innovation? In Apples little golden garden, Linux, Chrome and hundreds of other things you've come to understand as required features of an OS would not exist. If Microsoft would ban competitive browsers like Apple did, we'd never dig out of the cesspool of IE6 internet.

And to build such innovative and updated software, you NEED the ability to modify parts of the system, not a sandbox.

(Disclaimer: This does not mean the security approach does not need to be updated. Sandboxes aren't a general solution though.)

Is this the electron killer?

More of Electron Enhancer, really.

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