With computers and applications becoming more and more smarter everyday, one is coming more close to security breeches and loopholes. Security issues today are more complex and harder to detect than they were five years ago. Developers are becoming more and more aware of this situation and they are finding out way to make computing more secure, fast and relaible.

One of the actions taken in this regard is application sandboxing. In this method, each process and application is kept in a “sandbox”, i.e. in an environment that is separate from the overall system. This ensures that damages and actions done by the app itself doesnt effect other apps or the system itself. Also, this make the apps more reliable and faster as its not effected by actions of the other apps.

Gnome developers are currently discussing plans to activate application sandboxing for Gnome apps in future. Some of the key issues has been laid and open for discussion in the Gnome Live! page. Some of the main points are:

• Maintain the integrity of the system
• Applications should not be able to undermine the system - they should not be able to cause it not to function, or to function in a sub-optimal manner
• Ensure that system resources are always available for what the user wants to do
• Background tasks should never stand in the way of user interaction - the focused application should always have the resources to behave in an effective manner
• Guarantee conformity in the behaviour of applications
• If you quit an application, it should always quit
• It should always be possible to uninstall an application
• Applications should not be able to cook up their own forms of system integration
• Each application should have access to the same set of predictable integration points
• The user should have control over application access to data and to particular services.

While still in whiteboard, this brings some exciting upcoming improvements for the user.