Doesn’t this already exist or did I imagine it?

I thought they introduced it years ago

Edit: oh I read again, this time it’s free

ECMAscript is based on JavaScript

I’m not gonna bother entertaining the rest of your post, you can’t seem to even get the basics right

Mate, actionscript was not only basically JavaScript with adobe vendor extensions, but it was literally a programming language! If that’s not arbitrary code, then you’ve got a crazy definition of what is! You’ve kinda unequivocally demonstrated that you have no idea what you’re talking about at this point, I’m afraid.

And way to completely misunderstand the evercookie. The flash part was how it could jump between browsers, no browser cookie can do that. It was a combination of everything that made it such a problem.

That’s literally the one main somewhat valid use case for plugins, and it’s basically because of DRM. A plugin that allows arbitrary code to run is a security nightmare, that’s why we don’t do it anymore.

A lot of the security features you describe were added by browser vendors late in the game because of how much of a security nightmare flash was. I was building web software back when this was all happening, I know first hand. People actually got pissy when browsers blocked the ability for flash to run without consent and access things like the clipboard. I even seem to remember a hacky way of getting at the filesystem in flash via using the file upload mechanism, but I can’t remember the specifics as this was obviously getting close to two decades ago now.

Your legitimate concerns about JavaScript are blockable by the browser.

Flash was a big component of something called the evercookie—one of the things that led to stuff like GDPR because of how permanently trackable it made people. Modern JavaScript tracking is (quite rightfully) incredibly limited compared to what was possible with flash around. You could track users between browsers FFS.

You’re starting to look like you don’t know what you’re talking about here.

Well, by that measure, you don’t need JavaScript to make inaccessible sites, there are plenty of sites out there that ruin accessibility with just HTML and CSS alone.

It’s always up to the developer to make sure the site is accessible. At least now it seems to be something that increasingly matters to search result rankings

Flash ran as a browser plugin (as in not an extension, but a native binary that is installed into the OS and runs beside the browser, we basically don’t do this for anything now)

Flash was pretty much on weekly security bulletins in the final years, arbitrary code execution and privilege escalation exploits were common, that’s why Adobe killed it.

Flash was never safe and comparing JavaScript to it as a greater risk shows you’ve not fully understood the threat model of at least one of the two.

Flash was magnitudes worse than the risk of JS today, it’s not even close.

Accessibility is orthogonal to JavaScript if the site is being built to modern standards.

Unfortunately preference is not reality, the modern web uses JavaScript, no script is not an effective enough solution.

A whitelist wouldn’t mitigate this issue entirely due to bundling

Not a solution. Much of the modern web is reliant on JavaScript to function.

Noscript made sense when the web was pages with superfluous scripts that enhanced what was already there.

Much of the modern web is web apps that fundamentally break without JS. And picking and choosing unfortunately won’t generally protect from this because it’s common practice to use a bundler such as webpack to keep your page weight down. This will have been pulled in as a dependency in many projects and the site either works or does not based on the presence of the bundle.

Not saying this is a great situation or anything, but suggesting noscript as a solution is increasingly anachronistic.

Ah fair play, I didn’t realise unrar was from the same guy, cheers for the extra context.

So I guess we go back to what else it could be:

• The licence could still be an issue as it’s not FOSS and parts of android are, so I guess that could prevent its inclusion if it’s incompatible with existing licences
• The licence could also be an issue in terms of wanting feature parity with zip support, which would include creation of archives.
• As I mentioned before, the percentage of users who are interacting with non-zip archives locally on their devices is a pretty small percentage. It may be on the backlog, but it’s not going to be far from the bottom in priority.
• How many of the use cases are not served by the third party app ecosystem sufficiently that it would benefit inclusion in the actual OS and the extra maintenance that would entail
• RAR is an outdated format and in decline at this point, there are better options to add before getting to it
• Let’s also address the elephant in the room regarding the last point—I don’t think I’ve seen RARs used regularly outside of piracy in quite some time. If that’s the main use case, Google is not going to be bothered about supporting it.

There’s probably other reasons I’ve not thought of, but just a couple of the above are enough to explain it IMO

We’re talking about Android, unrar doesn’t have anything to do with this really.

RAR is and will continue to be a proprietary format with an owner who can seek royalties.

It’s like saying Google should stop licensing MPEG because ffmpeg exists—it simply doesn’t work like that

And there’s not really any money to be made charging licenses to open source projects—see ffmpeg/vlc

Google including it in android though means they can charge licenses as a per unit fee because, basically, Google (or phone manufacturers) is a company with money.

I think a big part of it for RAR specifically is that it’s a proprietary format that would technically require Google to license it, and for the tiny percentage of users that would benefit, they don’t bother.

A seemingly random but relevant example is the Japanese travel card situation with Pixel phones—every pixel on the planet has the necessary hardware to support Japanese travel cards since the pixel 6, however only pixel phones bought in Japan can use the feature (locked by the OS) because it would mean Google would have to pay a per-device cost worldwide.

This is kinda a similar situation I’d bet, they’ve proven they would rather not include the feature than pay for licensing

I suppose you’d fall into my “you’d install a file manager app if you actually needed it” category

People don’t tend to need to browse local archive formats on their phones I guess, and if they do, they’ll have a file manager app with support.

There’s support for some formats if your files are in cloud storage like Google drive, which is a more likely use case for phone users

Not that they were a great company to begin with, but nice one Mike Ashley, killed off another brand basically

Haha okay

Edit: after a skim and a quick Google, this basically looks like a packaging up of existing modern processor features (sorta AVX/SVE with a load of speculative execution thrown on top)

Okay, fine, rainier part

That’s a weird emoji to use for elixir

Nah that’s in the Netherlands