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Comment by fbelzile | Hacker News Reader

No, please no. Make sand-boxing an optional feature the user has control over. Sort of like containerized tabs in Firefox. Not all apps have legitimate reasons for accessing your hard drive, but I'd argue that 90% of them that do, really need to. Let the user decide.

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As an example, Adobe Acrobat. It's obvious why it needs 3 services, a persistent update checker, a couple shell extensions, 2 non services set to run at startup, and always running extensions for Outlook, Excel, and Word. All totally necessary things that a restrictive app model would unjustly break.

Don't forget it can randomly decide to try and render your computer inoperable because it guesses you might've had a dodgy version of Photoshop installed at some point in recorded history!

The mobile sandboxing parent comment mentioned lets the user decide: an app that requests permission to access files triggers an OS dialog asking if the user wants to allow the app to access them.

If you look at the android sandbox architecture (I m guessing ios is similar but I m less familiar with it) there are intentional "holes" in the sandbox that are managed by the user permissions (hence the user does have a say). I don't think a lot of people are arguing about 100% sandbox or nothing. I know that depending on where one stands they have feedback to give about how android permissions could be better, but still the ecosystem is better with it than without it.

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