When It Comes to Human Rights, There Are No Online Security Shortcuts
wired.com
wired.com
It's clear that browser based security now is poor, and inadequate for anything real. It's also clear that people want really easy to use tools. The only argument should be "can browser security improve more easily than ease of installation of non-browser software", but no one is even discussing that because Wired chooses to make this about their female reporter being 'put in her place' by an evil male security practitioner.
(Ultimately I assume browser and OS will converge, and installing software in browser will be roughly the same as installing it outside the browser, but for some intermediate period, one of these approaches will likely predominate. It will be way easier to solve either on mobile than desktop, though -- Apple could easily implement proprietary Safari extensions to improve browser security, and has made installing apps on iOS easy already. Google could do the same on ChromeOS and Android, and Microsoft could do this on WP8.)