Hacker News Reader

Also from a security standpoint, it seems to me that having all apps work in the browser is creating single points of failure.

View on HN

Can you elaborate on the security considerations of this? It seems like you could just as easily say it's more secure because it reduces the attack surface to a well-tested program with mature sandboxing.

You mean like the OS is supposed to be?

Exactly. The browser becomes (basically) an OS running within the host OS, so s/he's invented a kind of half-cocked virtualisation. There's a joke in there somewhere about turtles all the way down.

It goes both ways, the sandboxing means that the app has less access to the OS, but the flip side is that the open web has more access to the app (CSRF, XSS, evil extensions, etc.)

Coincidentally, I just published a blog post that touches on this from both sides: https://paulbutler.org/2020/the-webassembly-app-gap/

Reply on news.ycombinator.com