[pjmlp]

I love sandboxes, on Windows, Mac OS X, Android, iOS ,Chrome OS X.

One day my GNU/Linux installs will also only run sandboxed applications.

I guess you don't use either an iOS or Android device, because you cannot do regular UNIX IPC on them.

[klibertp]

> I guess you don't use

I think he was talking about programming the apps, not just using them. From the looks of it (after reading the comments here and nothing more, so excuse me if I'm completely wrong) it may be a real inconvenience from the dev perspective: I can somehow understand the "no 127.0.0.1 communication" policy, but I expect to communicate with a spawned process via stdin/stdout pipes.

[pjmlp]

You have the same issue in other sandbox models.

Old style IPC leads to information leaks and is another attack vector.

You cannot do that on Android for example, Google explicitly removed UNIX V IPC from their Linux fork. You are expected to use TCP/IP or Android RPCs, assuming the app has android.permission.INTERNET permission.

Also using fork/exec() on Android isn't a good idea, http://stackoverflow.com/questions/16179062/using-exec-with-...

Which I doubt that would still work on Android 7 by the way.

On iDevices, the same applies.

https://developer.apple.com/library/content/documentation/Se...

So people are complaining about Microsoft adopting what is already best practices on the other desktop/mobile sandbox models.

[klibertp]

> You have the same issue in other sandbox models.

Would what PC-BSD does with jails qualify as an exception?

> So people are complaining about Microsoft adopting what is already best practices on the other desktop/mobile sandbox models.

Now I'm curious - weren't people complaining when the other sandbox systems were designed/created? It really looks a bit inconvenient (I'm referring to the SO explanation of what Android Chrome does), so I'd expect some reasonable opposition. It could be that with time people got used to the restrictions and don't complain that often anymore.

To be honest, I like PC-BSD model, but that's probably not a good idea for platforms where the resources are constrained. It works ok on the desktop, though - I didn't work with PC-BSD itself for long, but I did the same with Docker on Linux (for web browsers) and the performance hit wasn't that bad IIRC.

[pjmlp]

I would need to look int PC-BSD, never used it.

As for the other sandbox models, the only people I have seen complaining thus far, has been in sites like HN, I never heard any of our customers complaining about those restrictions, or caring about them.

[owl57]

IIRC iOS lets you connect to other apps on 127.0.0.1 just fine. But it won't work in the obvious use case of a foreground client and a background server without additional hacks, because the server can be suspended and the connection attempt alone won't wake it up.

[flukus]

iOs and android aren't general purpose computers.

[pjmlp]

They are to me, when I make use of an external keyboard.

And from the looks of it, many people think the same way.

Also the same applies to sandboxed applications on OS X and Chrome OS.