My belief is that Apple will eventually try to lock down macOS entirely or move to something similar to iOS sandboxing. This would more or less solve your problem and not hurt the majority of people’s experience. However, to make the OS good enough for software development, Apple will make it easy to create virtualized environments. This to me seems like the correct trade off and might actually be a net win for most. I have never understood why it’s a good idea to mess with your core OS to get some code to compile - use something where you don’t have to worry every time there is an OS upgrade.
> My belief is that Apple will eventually try to lock down macOS entirely or move to something similar to iOS sandboxing. This would more or less solve your problem and not hurt the majority of people’s experience.
Strict file-level-granularity sandboxing breaks all kinds of multi-file formats [1], because users will want to simply open the respective main file just as usual (especially if launching the file from the desktop or a file explorer window) and then expect that the program of course should be able to access not just that particular file itself, but any associated files, too.
The OS however cannot be expected to know the peculiarities of each and every file format, so how is this supposed to work without either degrading the user experience or else weakening the sandbox up to a point where it is possibly almost pointless?
Plus it also makes editing file paths in programs more annoying, because you can no longer directly edit a path (or paste it in from elsewhere) if it's displayed in a text input and instead always have to spend a few additional clicks because you must go through the OS file picker. (Though admittedly this latter issue might be more of a power user problem)
[1] Multi-part archives, multi-part video files, playlists, videos with separate subtitle files, HTML documents containing links to other local HTML documents or referencing various sub-resources (images/videos/audio/style sheets/scripts/...), Audacity projects, images with metadata in external sidecar files, ditto for georeferenced images, QGIS projects, ...
So, regression to several systems ago? Maybe System 7, or MacOS 8, or 9? If so, we'll need a new thing like Super Boomerang…except with all the modern security, it'd practic'ly have to come from Apple as some kind of option. )*:
