Re:Against an Increasingly User-Hostile Web (2017)
by bloak on Thursday May 28, 2020 @07:37AM
(#23336118)
Perhaps you're right. Perhaps we need to replace JavaScript with something that can be more easily constrained.
There seems to be something wrong with a world in which it is in some ways easier/safer to run an untrusted binary, by putting it in a container, than an untrusted web page. You can of course put the browser in a container, but it's crazy that we have to resort to that.
Thanks to Spectre and Meltdown, if you want to be really safe when running untrusted code, you need separate hardware.
Of course, on the majority of websites I am not doing any interactions where that would be necessary to me in the first place, and on the majority of websites where JavaScript is used, it's used with little mind towards privacy.
That it isn't inherently evil is a pretty toothless argument that fundamentally doesn't address the proposed solution you're responding to. The fact that the web is a cesspool of scripts ranging from completely useless to directly user-hostile isn't nullified by use cases that are so rare that you from the top of your head can apparently only hypothesize about them.