Yep. The web-heads are slowly reimplementing Unix in the browser. [0] We could have avoided this with better, wider-spread support for sandboxing of untrusted executables.
Alas.
[0] They don't have crashdumps yet, but I expect that they soon will.
If you ask me, the rise of the Web as app platform is a scathing indictment of the state of operating systems, both in research and in practice. Operating systems are so bad at providing a safe and mostly stateless sandbox for untrusted code that the Web, despite being a crappy app platform in every other way, has won.
Look at WebGL for example. Over the past 20 years there has been practically zero interest in making a safe, sandboxed version of OpenGL. It wasn't until browser vendors got involved that people even seriously considered it. Browsers had to implement most of the safety features themselves, in user space. The operating system level GPU interfaces will likely never be anywhere near as secure, because apparently OS vendors don't care about running untrusted code.
> Operating systems are so bad at providing a safe and mostly stateless sandbox for untrusted code that the Web, despite being a crappy app platform in every other way, has won.
"Worse is better."
> The operating system level GPU interfaces will likely never be anywhere near as secure, because apparently OS vendors don't care about running untrusted code.
It's handled with emulation and virtualization. The future of safety looks like QubesOS.
Alas.
[0] They don't have crashdumps yet, but I expect that they soon will.