Some GUI objects like the report abuse button we don't want users to have the ability to be able to remove. Another sensitive area is the chat window. If it was completely scriptable, you could write a script to make it look like another user was saying something that he wasn't. This is not really desirable.
HttpGet is currently a privileged function for two main reasons:
- It would allow users to get dynamic content into levels, which would make moderation a more difficult task.
- Poorly or maliciously written scripts could HttpGet roblox.com in an infinite loop, sapping our server resources.
There was no obvious benefit, but some obvious downsides. We prefer to solve only the problems that need to be solved in order to ship features, so we err on the side of caution for things like this. If we later decide to open up new functionality, like making the ROBLOX social graph available through an API, we can do that with a dedicated interface that limits the number of requests you can make to the website in a given period, and only return the info that we are sure we want you to be able to get.
It's interesting to note that for a very long time Adobe Flash player didn't support TCP sockets for the same reason.