&gt; all of them are likely to be able to compromise a messaging application that boots from a web page.<p>All of them are <i>likely</i> to be able to compromise your OS, the Intel Management Engine (<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;hackaday.com&#x2F;2016&#x2F;01&#x2F;22&#x2F;the-trouble-with-intels-management-engine&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;hackaday.com&#x2F;2016&#x2F;01&#x2F;22&#x2F;the-trouble-with-intels-manag...</a>), your flash drives, the baseband on your blackphone... There&#x27;s so much code, so many layers of abstraction involved in doing even the most basic things and so many things for which the US IC (let alone the 5E) almost certainly has exploits for that this quoted line is entirely moot when put in the context of attack economics.<p>I was looking for any insight you might have into why a web application with the latest in protections surrounding the execution of unauthorized code and running in a sandboxed browser would still be more vulnerable compared to a native application running in usermode, but then you said...<p>&gt; and today, they need to install software to do [address serious adversaries].<p>I guess I can keep looking forward to someone else to address the point you tried to raise, since your position seems to be more of an emotional one. The only way we&#x27;ll be able to advance privacy is by advancing ease of use. Web applications do a good job of providing that, and the IETF and browser makers are doing an excellent job of creating and integrating security standards to allow developers to bring that ease of use to realms of secure computing which traditionally required extensive manual configuration.<p>Do you want wider adoption of security and privacy-assuring technologies by the general public? Be like the rest of us in the AppSec community and support the devs who try to advance the state of the art.