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Re:The Line of Death (2017) by na85 on Friday March 18, 2022 @11:50AM (#30723764)
Seems to me a lot of this is possible because developers are lazy and want to shoehorn application delivery and runtime into a system originally designed for sharing documents.

Those same developers seem to heavily overlap with the group that loves to shit on FTP and DNS etc., because they were designed for a less adversarial internet. I'm not sure what to make of that cognitive dissonance.

But, maybe browsers as we know them should die and be replaced with something better.

Re:The Line of Death (2017) by tenebrisalietum on Friday March 18, 2022 @06:12PM (#30728196)
The term "browser" is easier to say than "Javascript/WASM Application And Document Object Model Rendering Engine With Bidirectional-but-mostly-client HTTP Interface".

Internet Explorer should definitely be renamed "Application Runtime Engine for ActiveX" though.

Re:The Line of Death (2017) by fluoridation on Friday March 18, 2022 @12:12PM (#30724060)
While I think stuff like Google Docs is practically magic, I agree. I think it'd be a net positive if it wasn't possible to do stuff like that on a browser.

Sometimes I wonder how things would have turned out if Java plugins hadn't been security Swiss cheese.

Re:The Line of Death (2017) by DarraghBurke on Friday March 18, 2022 @01:45PM (#30725246)
Would it better for the majority of applications to be native apps that run outside a sandbox with full access to the filesystem?

The browser actually gives us more security.

Re:The Line of Death (2017) by fluoridation on Friday March 18, 2022 @05:52PM (#30728014)
There's no reason why applets couldn't have been sandboxed as much as any browser scripting. If they had taken the role JS now occupies, we might have seen that development.
Re:The Line of Death (2017) by gowld on Friday March 18, 2022 @12:58PM (#30724630)
Even if the application is "delivered", it can still be evil.

What's missing is clear attribution of which "app" created the window.