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Yes, it would be very nice if operating systems had a sane (let alone user-friendly!) way to properly, thoroughly sandbox userland applications.

It's a large reason why "web applications" became a thing -- it gives you sandboxed remote programs (and easy-access to boot!) Even if the web-browsing sandbox is flawed, it's been a convenient band-aid over a fundamental OS feature that, sadly, still doesn't properly exist.




macOS has sandboxed apps, with the same underlying model as iOS (not sure if it asks for camera permissions and such, but apps declare a list of “entitlements” and are granted only those). It’s required for App Store apps, but other than that it’s opt-in. Outside of the App Store, basically it’s just something like DEP or ASLR: a mitigation that isn’t really visible to users unless they look for it.


Like UWP on Windows.




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