In theory a less resource intensive program that should be more secure and have fewer bugs. Electron and React Native are large frameworks that abstract away a lot at the cost of bundling a web browser and significant code overhead into your program.
I’m not optimistic they’ll actually do it well but that’s a separate topic.
Less surface area to attack; Electron bundles a stripped down Chrorium browser and to make graphics you also gotta use JS… so basically there could be 3 more parts to attack
It would (hopefully) have less attack surface. Electron is, after all, a whole browser, and needs to be able to do all the things a browser can do, while a native implementation can limit itself to just the very limited network interactions needed. (e.g. while XSS attacks are quite hard to do on a modern browser, a native app would make them impossible)
Does rust have a mature sandboxing environment similar to a browser though?
Legit asking as I thought that was one of the selling points to electron. It also seems like one of the easiest things a shiny new app that leans heavily on Claude is probably gonna fuck up
Hate for discord aside, what’s the benefits / disadvantages here for the users?
In theory a less resource intensive program that should be more secure and have fewer bugs. Electron and React Native are large frameworks that abstract away a lot at the cost of bundling a web browser and significant code overhead into your program.
I’m not optimistic they’ll actually do it well but that’s a separate topic.
Why would it be more secure? Electron has a massive ecosystem with a good bug bounty program afaik.
Less surface area to attack; Electron bundles a stripped down Chrorium browser and to make graphics you also gotta use JS… so basically there could be 3 more parts to attack
It would (hopefully) have less attack surface. Electron is, after all, a whole browser, and needs to be able to do all the things a browser can do, while a native implementation can limit itself to just the very limited network interactions needed. (e.g. while XSS attacks are quite hard to do on a modern browser, a native app would make them impossible)
Does rust have a mature sandboxing environment similar to a browser though?
Legit asking as I thought that was one of the selling points to electron. It also seems like one of the easiest things a shiny new app that leans heavily on Claude is probably gonna fuck up