[taftster]

I almost feel like this should just be the default action for all applications. I don't need them to escape out of a defined root. It's almost like your documents and application are effectively locked together. You have to give permissions for an app to extra data from outside of the sandbox.

Linux has this capability, of course. And it seems like MacOS prompts me a lot for "such and such application wants to access this or that". But I think it could be a lot more fine-grained, personally.

[josephg]

I've been arguing for this for years. There's no reason every random binary should have unfettered, invisible access to everything on my computer as if it were me.

iOS and Android both implement these security policies correctly. Why can't desktop operating systems?

[giobox]

The short answer is tech debt. The major mobile OSes got to build a new third party software platform from day 0 in the late 2000s, one which focused on and enforced priorities around power consumption and application sandboxing from the getgo etc.

The most popular desktop OSes have decades of pre-existing software and APIs to support and, like a lot of old software, the debt of choices made a long time ago that are now hard/expensive to put right.

The major desktop OSes are to some degree moving in this direction now (note the ever increasing presence of security prompts when opening "things" on macOS etc etc), but absent a clean sheet approach abandoning all previous third party software like the mobile OSes got, this arguably can't happen easily over night.

[marky1991]

Mobile platforms are entirely useless to me for exactly this reason, individual islands that don't interact to make anything more generally useful. I would never use any os that worked like that, it's for toys and disposable software only imo.

[IcyWindows]

Windows has had this for over a decade, but no one wants to put their application in a sandbox.

[BobbyTables2]

And then there’s dbus…

Damn file protection not even enough…

[TiredOfLife]

They tried. And the rent seekers made a huge noise against