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A comment on What Spectre and Meltdown Mean for WebKit. Parent comment

Re:What Spectre and Meltdown Mean for WebKit by alien_at_work on Tuesday January 09, 2018 @08:32AM (#16105973)
>Plenty of harmful things are done with C and C++ but no one is saying we should deactivate native apps written in unsafe languages,

That's not remotely a valid comparison. If I run a native app, I had to get that app somehow and install it. I know it can modify my computer (and probably have to give it persmission to do so). A web page can automatically load other pages, even in the background and do who knows what. For most of the existance of the web we've all had the mental model of "sandbox". We never had that for native apps.

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Re:What Spectre and Meltdown Mean for WebKit by hnonlyforu on Tuesday January 09, 2018 @08:58AM (#16106145)
Same thing could happen to apps. There was a Baidu app in China that secretly downloaded random videos just to eat up the users' data plan, so they will buy more data.
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Re:What Spectre and Meltdown Mean for WebKit by alien_at_work on Tuesday January 09, 2018 @09:05AM (#16106196)
Again: we've always known that desktop apps were risky and could do anything to our computer (and for years, a lot of "free" windows software installed malware and viruses). We were always told that JavaScript is "sandboxed".
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