bias disclosure: i used to do Android dev and kinda hate the browser personally.
i don’t get this take. “Web browser is sandbox by default”. sure, it has to do the rail grind with a rake to access system calls, but in a modern system apps are also sandboxed, especially on a smartphone or when downloaded with a managed app service. the OS gives you the ability to specify permissions, although to what degree depends on your provider. your browser _obviously_ also has the permissions you’re talking about. and now we have introduced yet more vectors in the form of cookies where web _applications_ can track activity _between applications_ with that just kinda being part of the spec, and it totally neuters the protections that the OS gives you because once you configure Firefox to get your location for Open Maps, now you’ve totally given control to your location permissions for _all web apps_ to yet another corporate driven point of failure.
don’t even get me started on the UI mess.
my tinfoil hat theory is that the browser is pushed by mostly bad actors trying to get data, while anyone providing a real user experience has a nice native app.
i’m seeing this at my corporate software job now. that service that you used to have security and product approval for to even read their Swagger doc has an MCP server you can install with 2 clicks.
the idea of one language to rule them all is very compelling. it’s been promised a lot, and now everyone hates Java.
but the truth is that Rust is not meant for everything. UI is an abstraction layer that is very human and dynamic. and i can come and say, “well, we can hide that dynamism with clever graph composition tricks” à la Elm, React, Compose, etc, but the machinery that you have to build for even the simplest button widget in almost every Rust UI toolkit is a mess of punctuation, with things like lifetimes and weird state management systems. you end up building a runtime when what you want is just the UI. that’s what higher level languages were made for. of course data science could be done in Rust as well, but is the lifetime of the file handle you’re trying to open really what you’re worried about when doing data analysis?
i think Rust has a future in the UI/graphics engine space, but you have to be pretty stubborn to use it for your front end.
> also it is amazing to me that shells still exist in more-or-less the same form. dear god can I just get a terminal that runs something like Python directly?
i’ve been maining `nushell` for about 1.5 years now, and it’s basically this. a real programming language that is designed as a command runner and output parser. i have a ton of scripts that parse output from common commands like `git` and facilitate a ton of shell-based workflows: https://github.com/covercash2/dotfiles/tree/main/nuenv
i don’t get this take. “Web browser is sandbox by default”. sure, it has to do the rail grind with a rake to access system calls, but in a modern system apps are also sandboxed, especially on a smartphone or when downloaded with a managed app service. the OS gives you the ability to specify permissions, although to what degree depends on your provider. your browser _obviously_ also has the permissions you’re talking about. and now we have introduced yet more vectors in the form of cookies where web _applications_ can track activity _between applications_ with that just kinda being part of the spec, and it totally neuters the protections that the OS gives you because once you configure Firefox to get your location for Open Maps, now you’ve totally given control to your location permissions for _all web apps_ to yet another corporate driven point of failure.
don’t even get me started on the UI mess.
my tinfoil hat theory is that the browser is pushed by mostly bad actors trying to get data, while anyone providing a real user experience has a nice native app.
press F for my reputation.