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by mark_undoio
475 days ago
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> Google Docs renders to a virtual canvas in the browser in the same way an applet would've back in 2003, except it would've been able to open files directly from the file system. I'd have said the situation back then was a bit better than that - a Java applet wouldn't have been able to access your filesystem by default, for instance. Part of the benefit of Sun's Java was that the bytecode itself could be statically verified to only have good behaviour and the plugin would then sandbox what it could access at runtime. The plugin itself would obviously have had bugs - like all software - but it's not obvious to me that was intrinsically worse than having all that code as part of the browser (as we do now). I'd contrast it with ActiveX and (I think), which was very free about what its applets could do (basically just Windows executable code, I think). Flash I'm less clear on the limitations of. We have moved on in other ways, of course - browsers are architected to isolate processes more, including use of things like seccomp. |
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