Do you want to reinforce established monopolies? Because I can't think of a better way of doing that than having a technical difference between "trusted" and "untrusted" sites.
If anything, Spectre class attacks really showed how hard it is to properly sandbox arbitrary programs.
Yes, the CPUs are complex, but the attacks happen on a high conceptual level, level at which the CPU is fairly simple. It's not like they rely on an obscure detail or bug.
No one (publicly) figured those out for 2 decades when the involved ideas (speculation, cache timings) are well known, common and did not change.
This indicates that for something with such a large surface as the various web standards, where both the spec and the implementations are changing all the time, there is very little hope.
Turning it on for trusted websites is one click away, once per domain, and it could save me in the future.
What valid reason is there to have an "application" and any documentation or related HTML material from the same site on different ports? Or, as some have pointed out elsewhere when this has come up, to have "applications" and "documents" use completely different protocols, languages and native clients, when both are often used together?
Banking websites for example don't need to be Applications and added protection for cross-site scripting etc. would be beneficial. Restrict things further and you default to supporting screen readers etc.
IMO it's a simple question 'can you do the same thing with a sheet of printed paper.' I can fill out paper forms and hand them to someone just fine. Don't forget a Check is really just a piece of paper with a form on it.
I'm not trying to be overly pedantic or combative here but making a distinction between client-side and server-side code seems arbitrary. I understand it in terms of managing privilege - you can't control what someone does on a remote server, and that code isn't running on your machine, but it seems like the meaningful distinction here isn't between documents and applications but between local and remote applications.
Just because I type in yourdomain.com does not mean I want you to be able to start playing death metal from my speakers. What about typing yourdomain.com means I want you to break my back button? Show a popup rather than close the browser? Churn CPU cycles crypto mining or do just about anything beyond hand me a document? Display a flashing GIF?
The current model is basically handing complete control over my machine to a third party that may be compromised by anyone any time I click a random link.
The single greatest web innovation in the last 30 years was readability mode.
Given the way HTTP works, I think it kind of does. It means you want the server at yourdomain.com to send you whatever content that URL points to, if anything. Which, granted, given the complexity of the web now, does seem fraught with danger, but what alternative would there be? Profiling each site for embedded content, size and complexity and whitelisting the elements before rendering? Browsers already let you block scripts, disable images and autoplay, overwrite or disable stylesheets and mute tabs, that would seem to be sufficient.
>The current model is basically handing complete control over my machine to a third party that may be compromised by anyone any time I click a random link.
That's a good point, but separating "applications" from "documents" wouldn't solve that problem, since that's presumably the model the applications would still be using. Sure, static pages that aren't running client side code would be safe, but those pages already are safe.
Anything that could be done to make a separate application space run safely could be done to make them run safely on the existing web, couldn't it?
>Given the way HTTP works, I think it kind of does. It means you want the server at yourdomain.com to send you whatever content that URL points to, if anything.
I think the issue is really that the client (web browser) shouldn't try to interpret whatever was sent back if it isn't considered safe. In other words, there should be limits of what the browser will do with whatever is send back over HTTP.
Yes, but you could tighten things down and treat the modern web as a transient application delivery system. Where users have to explicitly grant access to each application, and grant it whichever specific permissions it needs. I also wouldn't be against having two browsers, one for running applications and one to browse the web.
For you. From what I see, everyone else seems to be enjoying the dancing and singing monkeys online.
[1] web application pushers
edit: hn "syntax"
Yes, it does require confidence that the publisher will actually show your ad, but it was the same thing for the journals. On the web you can still track outgoing links and have the referer, so you can know the actual impact of your ads anyways.
It seems like this sort of iterative securing of different things over time could be a good way to secure the web while also giving time for older sites to upgrade.
(Disclosure: I work at Google, though not on browsers)