The web browser is a sandbox, and it runs as an OS process, which is a sandbox.
I think their comment means you’d be better off targeting an OS level sandbox (maybe based on OCI(?), which means a different container for each OS kernel or breaking kernel change — new docker doesn’t run on old linux as it is).
If you chose the OS level sandbox correctly, that would probably be more cpu-efficient than the web browser.
However, that’s a big “if”, since most of the linux sandbox thingies take multiple seconds to spawn a process, and multiply memory usage by 10-100x.
I guess the term "sandbox" can become overloaded. I'm not thinking of OS processes as sandboxes in this context.
> However, that’s a big “if”, since most of the linux sandbox thingies take multiple seconds to spawn a process, and multiply memory usage by 10-100x.
And this is the thing I'm not willing to accept. Well, I can tolerate excessive memory consumption depending on what I'm doing, but I refuse to entertain long boot times. It's the main reason I avoid Java apps, Flatpacks, and so on.
X11 sucks. Wayland sucks. Get rid of them both! But the browser's not going away, and it's open standards based and cross platform, and there's a huge amount of collaborative work and money and talent going into making it better and more powerful and more efficient and more secure across the entire industry and all platforms, unlike X11 and Wayland (which nobody gives a shit about outside of a few fanatical Linux desktop users), or even the Windows and Mac desktops and Android and iOS interfaces (which billions of people use every day, but are stagnant terribly designed dead-ends).
The browser is a sandbox, so why run it on top of another leaky inflexible insufficient outdated sandbox full of clumps of dehydrated urine and cat turds like X11 or Wayland, instead of directly on the hardware?
No modern desktop environment is complete without a browser, so since you're stuck with it, why not just use the browser itself as the desktop environment (or whatever user interface paradigm you choose to use), since you're never getting rid of the browser, and modern non-browser desktops aren't as flexible or powerful or extensible as a browser, and most useful applications have been ported to run in the web browser environment anyway, so they can run across many different platforms, and be easily distributed and efficiently used over the network (unlike Wayland or "modern" X11 apps).
I'm just surprised this seems to be so hard for some people to understand, in spite of the fact that I've been making the same argument for more than a decade, and provided many links to those arguments, because it seems extremely obvious and straightforward to me, and the technology is finally mature enough to pull it off.
I included a lot of links to my previous posts over ten years explaining what it means in lots of detail with many different words and numerous examples and citations.
Did you read any of them? Did you read my other explanation below that I just wrote personally for your benefit? Does it make any sense to you?
Do you understand what I mean now, or do you need me to give you some more citations of other times I've written the same thing, because there are more. What was unclear, and did I leave anything out?
Do you have any more questions I haven't answered time and again and already gave you links to but you just didn't bother reading?
It's exasperating and insulting that you blithely dismiss what I wrote without saying what you disagree with or can't understand, but I promise you, it really is easy to understand and extremely obvious on its face, if you will just take the time to read what I wrote, before complaining you don't know what it means.
If you have time to complain, then you have time to read what I wrote and linked to, before complaining you don't know what it means.
If you're too busy to read, then please don't waste your and my time complaining you don't understand what you didn't bother to read.
I forgot about those links. No, I didn't look at them. I've taken a quick look now. They seem to be about X and everything that's wrong with it, which is fine, but I don't see much about browsers, and that's what I was responding to your comment about.
My experience with making an app work consistently across browsers is that it's hard work. Making it also work consistently with each OS it runs on is considerably harder. You want to guess how many times I've been asked to even consider either of those two things by a manager, let alone make them a priority? Never.
And going by my experience as a user of browser-based software, I'd say that's pretty normal across the industry.
And that's to say nothing of the fact that these apps are typically slow, cumbersome (by which I mean they throttle my CPU and drain my laptop battery), and crash no less frequently than unsafe apps written in unsafe languages like C (despite the fact that that's supposed to be impossible).
It seems to me that you want to rewrite the world in the browser. That doesn't seem very different to me from rewriting the world in Wayland. Whatever the differences between the two, they are insignificant besides the fallacy of rewriting the world.
As for the rest of your reply, I have no idea why you think I owe you however much time it would take me to read however many links you posted above. If you have something relevant to say, say it in the thread. Don't presume to leave it for me as a homework assignment.
hedora|2 years ago
I think their comment means you’d be better off targeting an OS level sandbox (maybe based on OCI(?), which means a different container for each OS kernel or breaking kernel change — new docker doesn’t run on old linux as it is).
If you chose the OS level sandbox correctly, that would probably be more cpu-efficient than the web browser.
However, that’s a big “if”, since most of the linux sandbox thingies take multiple seconds to spawn a process, and multiply memory usage by 10-100x.
marrs|2 years ago
> However, that’s a big “if”, since most of the linux sandbox thingies take multiple seconds to spawn a process, and multiply memory usage by 10-100x.
And this is the thing I'm not willing to accept. Well, I can tolerate excessive memory consumption depending on what I'm doing, but I refuse to entertain long boot times. It's the main reason I avoid Java apps, Flatpacks, and so on.
DonHopkins|2 years ago
X11 sucks. Wayland sucks. Get rid of them both! But the browser's not going away, and it's open standards based and cross platform, and there's a huge amount of collaborative work and money and talent going into making it better and more powerful and more efficient and more secure across the entire industry and all platforms, unlike X11 and Wayland (which nobody gives a shit about outside of a few fanatical Linux desktop users), or even the Windows and Mac desktops and Android and iOS interfaces (which billions of people use every day, but are stagnant terribly designed dead-ends).
The browser is a sandbox, so why run it on top of another leaky inflexible insufficient outdated sandbox full of clumps of dehydrated urine and cat turds like X11 or Wayland, instead of directly on the hardware?
No modern desktop environment is complete without a browser, so since you're stuck with it, why not just use the browser itself as the desktop environment (or whatever user interface paradigm you choose to use), since you're never getting rid of the browser, and modern non-browser desktops aren't as flexible or powerful or extensible as a browser, and most useful applications have been ported to run in the web browser environment anyway, so they can run across many different platforms, and be easily distributed and efficiently used over the network (unlike Wayland or "modern" X11 apps).
I'm just surprised this seems to be so hard for some people to understand, in spite of the fact that I've been making the same argument for more than a decade, and provided many links to those arguments, because it seems extremely obvious and straightforward to me, and the technology is finally mature enough to pull it off.
DonHopkins|2 years ago
Did you read any of them? Did you read my other explanation below that I just wrote personally for your benefit? Does it make any sense to you?
Do you understand what I mean now, or do you need me to give you some more citations of other times I've written the same thing, because there are more. What was unclear, and did I leave anything out?
Do you have any more questions I haven't answered time and again and already gave you links to but you just didn't bother reading?
It's exasperating and insulting that you blithely dismiss what I wrote without saying what you disagree with or can't understand, but I promise you, it really is easy to understand and extremely obvious on its face, if you will just take the time to read what I wrote, before complaining you don't know what it means.
If you have time to complain, then you have time to read what I wrote and linked to, before complaining you don't know what it means.
If you're too busy to read, then please don't waste your and my time complaining you don't understand what you didn't bother to read.
marrs|2 years ago
My experience with making an app work consistently across browsers is that it's hard work. Making it also work consistently with each OS it runs on is considerably harder. You want to guess how many times I've been asked to even consider either of those two things by a manager, let alone make them a priority? Never.
And going by my experience as a user of browser-based software, I'd say that's pretty normal across the industry.
And that's to say nothing of the fact that these apps are typically slow, cumbersome (by which I mean they throttle my CPU and drain my laptop battery), and crash no less frequently than unsafe apps written in unsafe languages like C (despite the fact that that's supposed to be impossible).
It seems to me that you want to rewrite the world in the browser. That doesn't seem very different to me from rewriting the world in Wayland. Whatever the differences between the two, they are insignificant besides the fallacy of rewriting the world.
As for the rest of your reply, I have no idea why you think I owe you however much time it would take me to read however many links you posted above. If you have something relevant to say, say it in the thread. Don't presume to leave it for me as a homework assignment.
unknown|2 years ago
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