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Strengthening the Microsoft Edge Sandbox

blogs.windows.com

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Re: Strengthening the Microsoft Edge Sandbox

#21

Post by cwyers »

egeozcan wrote: post #17
cwyers wrote: post #11

It's nice that they're investing in this. I just wish Edge didn't suck. I have tried using it as my primary browser and it's just not there. It crashes, trying to move tabs around is a pain, sometimes it just isn't performant.

It opens web pages very fast, there's that. But, alas, everything else just feels sluggish. In my crazy high-end system, it takes a second for the menu to show up after right clicking the address bar. What I want is IE's rendering speed with Chrome's UI and Firefox's extensibility (the good old system, not the new one).

Yeah, the rendering engine is pretty good (although you can still sometimes hit corner cases where it doesn't work very well). Honestly, I think a lot of the problem isn't Edge, it's the whole Universal Windows Platform. It just feels like it's not fully cooked yet for apps that are as sophisticated as a modern web browser.

Re: Strengthening the Microsoft Edge Sandbox

#22

Post by JamesNK »

mwcampbell wrote: post #13

The earlier post on Code Integrity Guard and Arbitrary Code Guard is also interesting: https://blogs.windows.com/msedgedev/2017/02/23/mitigating-ar... Microsoft should apply these same restrictions to all UWP apps. Yes, that means banning JIT compilation, as Apple does on iOS. And desktop applications shouldn't be able to inject DLLs into UWP applications and system components.

UWP apps from the Windows Store already ban JIT compilation - at least for .NET apps.

When .NET UWP applications are uploaded the store pre-compiles them on the server with .NET Native. The user only downloads and executes native code.

Re: Strengthening the Microsoft Edge Sandbox

#23

Post by comex »

DannyBee wrote: post #12
Someone1234 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chrome isn't Open Source. Chromium is Open Source. Chrome adds a lot of proprietary bits including (but not limited to): Audio & Video Codecs, Flash Plugin, Crash Reporting, Metrics, et al.

"Crash Reporting, Metrics," These are not proprietary, actually. " Audio & Video Codecs," Neither is this, last i looked (but i haven't looked in a while).

The "proprietary" codec support is open source but disabled by default in a Chromium build unless you pass proprietary_codecs=1. Why? Patents. AFAIK, Google pays for a license from the patent holders to decode the codecs within Chrome, but not an open-ended license for anyone using the source code. This is not their fault and no different from how many Linux distros don't include MP3 decoding by default. (Incidentally, the last MP3 patent is set to expire at the end of this year…)

Re: Strengthening the Microsoft Edge Sandbox

#24

Post by wolf550e »

egeozcan wrote: post #17
cwyers wrote: post #11

It's nice that they're investing in this. I just wish Edge didn't suck. I have tried using it as my primary browser and it's just not there. It crashes, trying to move tabs around is a pain, sometimes it just isn't performant.

It opens web pages very fast, there's that. But, alas, everything else just feels sluggish. In my crazy high-end system, it takes a second for the menu to show up after right clicking the address bar. What I want is IE's rendering speed with Chrome's UI and Firefox's extensibility (the good old system, not the new one).

Chrome's extension model is required for security, that's why firefox and edge adopted it and abandoned their old extension/plugin models.

Re: Strengthening the Microsoft Edge Sandbox

#25

Post by nxc18 »

cwyers wrote: post #21
egeozcan wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It opens web pages very fast, there's that. But, alas, everything else just feels sluggish. In my crazy high-end system, it takes a second for the menu to show up after right clicking the address bar. What I want is IE's rendering speed with Chrome's UI and Firefox's extensibility (the good old system, not the new one).

Yeah, the rendering engine is pretty good (although you can still sometimes hit corner cases where it doesn't work very well). Honestly, I think a lot of the problem isn't Edge, it's the whole Universal Windows Platform. It just feels like it's not fully cooked yet for apps that are as sophisticated as a modern web browser.

It's not fully cooked in general.

Try killing explorer.exe and resizing a UWP app; Something that should have nothing to do with app windows is fiddling with app frames.

General nonsense in how the UWP system works is responsible for a lot of lagginess and the generally immature feel of the system.

I would love to love Edge, but it really is crippled by the artifacts of its UWP implementation.

Re: Strengthening the Microsoft Edge Sandbox

#26

Post by [deleted] »

wolf550e wrote: post #24
egeozcan wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It opens web pages very fast, there's that. But, alas, everything else just feels sluggish. In my crazy high-end system, it takes a second for the menu to show up after right clicking the address bar. What I want is IE's rendering speed with Chrome's UI and Firefox's extensibility (the good old system, not the new one).

Chrome's extension model is required for security, that's why firefox and edge adopted it and abandoned their old extension/plugin models.

[deleted]

Re: Strengthening the Microsoft Edge Sandbox

#27

Post by [deleted] »

montibbalt wrote: post #14
tapirl wrote: post #4

just checked my website visitor log. Only 1% people use Edge. It is not a surprise at all. The best way to secure a browser is just like what chrome and firefox do: open source it.

Your site may be self-selecting for people who don't use Edge somehow. Our session count on a site geared for the average person puts Edge closer to 13%: Chrome - 57.54% IE - 14.12% Edge - 12.88% Firefox - 9.30% Safari - 4.13% Other browsers make up the remainder

[deleted]

Re: Strengthening the Microsoft Edge Sandbox

#28

Post by contextfree »

comex wrote: post #20
mwcampbell wrote: post #13

The earlier post on Code Integrity Guard and Arbitrary Code Guard is also interesting: https://blogs.windows.com/msedgedev/2017/02/23/mitigating-ar... Microsoft should apply these same restrictions to all UWP apps. Yes, that means banning JIT compilation, as Apple does on iOS. And desktop applications shouldn't be able to inject DLLs into UWP applications and system components.

In theory, they've always banned JIT in UWP apps, at least by default. UWP apps can't use VirtualProtect; they have to use VirtualProtectFromApp, which only allows JIT if you have the "codeGeneration" capability (and always enforces W^X). I don't use Windows so I don't know how it interacts with this new thing. Maybe the protection wasn't enforced at the kernel level? On any platform, it makes sense to enforce code s…

Modern apps completely banned JIT back in the Windows 8.x days (except for the CLR which was whitelisted), the APIs/capabilities you mentioned were only added in Windows 10.

Re: Strengthening the Microsoft Edge Sandbox

#29

Post by justinschuh »

DannyBee wrote: post #12
Someone1234 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chrome isn't Open Source. Chromium is Open Source. Chrome adds a lot of proprietary bits including (but not limited to): Audio & Video Codecs, Flash Plugin, Crash Reporting, Metrics, et al.

"Crash Reporting, Metrics," These are not proprietary, actually. " Audio & Video Codecs," Neither is this, last i looked (but i haven't looked in a while).

Yup. Our only closed source bits at this point are Flash and the Widevine CDM (DRM), both of which can be disabled from: Settings -> Content Settings.

Re: Strengthening the Microsoft Edge Sandbox

#30

Post by ryuuchin »

cwyers wrote: post #11

It's nice that they're investing in this. I just wish Edge didn't suck. I have tried using it as my primary browser and it's just not there. It crashes, trying to move tabs around is a pain, sometimes it just isn't performant.

One of my biggest gripes is not being able to use extensions in private/incognito mode.
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