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Microsoft Edge is apparently usurping Chrome on people’s PCs
(arstechnica.com)
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this post was submitted on 30 Jan 2024
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the fact that a perms system is essentially opt-in for non UWP apps is laughable
I disagree. Back when Win32 was put together, these sorts of modern standards hadn’t been thought through by anyone yet. Even the internet wasn’t pervasive.
Windows finally decided “You know what, this API is ancient; let’s see what we can do to make it more secure and trustworthy.” That involves reorganizing the way these apps own files, make certain requests, etc. It meant it wouldn’t support the same stuff. But, by failing to claim any certain advantages aside from “safety FROM the apps you’re installing”, no one adopted it.
In fact they had been thought of, but few wanted to develop for it and nobody wanted to enforce it. Look at how old "capabilities" systems are.
https://homes.cs.washington.edu/~levy/capabook/
It's the eternal problem of not wanting to break backwards compatibility which I totally get from a dev perspective. From a user security standpoint though, it kinda defeats the purpose of even having the system these days if it's so easy to circumvent.
It’s very easy to achieve that security as a user, in a non-circumventable way. Just refuse to install anything made as a Win32 executable.
You’ll be unable to do most of what people do daily, but you’ll be secure. And, Windows even offered that as a potential OS setup - and it was instantly seen as “Microsoft’s effort to lock down the operating system to only apps they approve”.
Users DID have that mindset shift once before. Back in Windows 2000, EVERY app worked off admin permissions. In Vista, everyone started getting annoying permission dialogs on their old apps to access admin folders - and just started accepting them. But now that most apps are correctly designed to access user folders, sudden admin dialogs are a big point of user suspicion. In some reality, we’d do the same with “…What? You want me to manually run a .exe file I’ve downloaded in the browser??”