Earlier quoted context omitted.
Apparently about a third of browser security vulnerabilities can be traced to memory safety issues. So, yes.
But how many of them come from the rendering engine?
Ask HN: Firefox vs. Chrome security
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Re: Ask HN: Firefox vs. Chrome security
#12Earlier quoted context omitted.
But how many of them come from the rendering engine?
They're slowing replacing more and more code with Rust. So eventually Rust will have a much bigger impact.
recent blog post https://blog.rust-lang.org/2017/11/14/Fearless-Concurrency-I...
Re: Ask HN: Firefox vs. Chrome security
#13My understanding is, that Firefox Quantum is not faster due to any additional rust parts, but because the team focused on performance optimization across the entire codebase. The only big rust component was introduced a couple of releases ago: Stylo. Once Webrender is in Firefox, a serious chunk of Firefox will be written in Rust.
Re: Ask HN: Firefox vs. Chrome security
#14My understanding is, that Firefox Quantum is not faster due to any additional rust parts, but because the team focused on performance optimization across the entire codebase. The only big rust component was introduced a couple of releases ago: Stylo. Once Webrender is in Firefox, a serious chunk of Firefox will be written in Rust.
"Quantum" as a term covers a large number of areas, this blog post covers it well:
https://hacks.mozilla.org/2017/11/entering-the-quantum-era-h...
Re: Ask HN: Firefox vs. Chrome security
#15Earlier quoted context omitted.
They're slowing replacing more and more code with Rust. So eventually Rust will have a much bigger impact.
Rust helps in to avoid segFaults which helps in avoid buffer overflows and stack overflows. most of security attacks are due to these and can prevent them better. there is no way a developer can write a code in Rust that causes segfaults ( atleast language promises that ). recent blog post https://blog.rust-lang.org/2017/11/14/Fearless-Concurrency-I...
Well, as long as you avoid unsafe blocks (which turn off a few safety features in a specific scope so you can do complex or performance critical things in that scope) you're supposed to be safe, but to my knowledge it's not formally proven. In practice it seems to be working quite well though.
Re: Ask HN: Firefox vs. Chrome security
#16Re: Ask HN: Firefox vs. Chrome security
#17My understanding is, that Firefox Quantum is not faster due to any additional rust parts, but because the team focused on performance optimization across the entire codebase. The only big rust component was introduced a couple of releases ago: Stylo. Once Webrender is in Firefox, a serious chunk of Firefox will be written in Rust.
Re: Ask HN: Firefox vs. Chrome security
#18My understanding is, that Firefox Quantum is not faster due to any additional rust parts, but because the team focused on performance optimization across the entire codebase. The only big rust component was introduced a couple of releases ago: Stylo. Once Webrender is in Firefox, a serious chunk of Firefox will be written in Rust.
So yes, Quantum is faster as a direct result both of Rust code, and of Rust's memory-safety-makes-parallelism-practical features. That is not the only source of performance improvement in Quantum though.
Also, Quantum isn't yet getting the full benefits possible from this code for a few reasons. Firefox 57 uses Stylo for content, but not yet for chrome, which will be coming in a later release. In Servo, CSS is parsed off the main thread, but in Quantum it is not yet (will be done in a future release). Servo pipelines style resolution and frame construction (basically after the top down pass to deal with the style cascade, we go back up the tree bottom up constructing the layout data structures), and Quantum does not yet do this. Lastly, cross-language inlining is missing which would allow inlining FFI calls. Servo doesn't have this issue since all the driver and layout code is also in Rust.
Re: Ask HN: Firefox vs. Chrome security
#19Earlier quoted context omitted.
They're slowing replacing more and more code with Rust. So eventually Rust will have a much bigger impact.
Rust helps in to avoid segFaults which helps in avoid buffer overflows and stack overflows. most of security attacks are due to these and can prevent them better. there is no way a developer can write a code in Rust that causes segfaults ( atleast language promises that ). recent blog post https://blog.rust-lang.org/2017/11/14/Fearless-Concurrency-I...
Well, you can very easily: write bad code in unsafe blocks.
That said, your badness is contained within unsafe blocks, so hopefully you have much less code to closely review.
Re: Ask HN: Firefox vs. Chrome security
#20While today's release represents a major step forward in the browser's performance and reliability, work on Quantum continues. One major weakness of Firefox, relative to Chrome and Edge, is its use of sandboxing and process isolation to limit the impact that security flaws can have. Next year Mozilla will be working to improve these areas. Early next year should also see the rollout of a new GPU-accelerated rendering engine."