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Firefox’s Fight for the Future of the Web

theguardian.com

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Re: Firefox’s Fight for the Future of the Web

#281

Post by diffeomorphism »

erikpukinskis wrote: post #181
hoptank wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you suggest Mozilla do instead? Mozilla don't just fund the development of their own products they also fund research [1] and other projects [2]. [1] https://research.mozilla.org/research-grants/ [2] https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/grants/ In a perfect world Mozilla would be funded by donations. I donate to Mozilla but it's a pittance compared to what they get from Google.

> What do you suggest Mozilla do instead? Mozilla should sell two products: 1) Storage a la iCloud 2) Payment processing a la Paypal And for marketing purposes they should get into discovery of free/open web services, a la old school Yahoo. As a web site builder, I don't want to have to manage credit cards. As a user, I don't want to have to trust random web sites with my credit card info. I also don't want to be red…

Could you explain a bit more? Why are you confident either would be profitable?

1) would be competing with google drive, onedrive and icloud, which are all funded by very big pockets and have other revenue sources. Furthermore, even dropbox has trouble competing with this.

2) Again competition by paypal, apple pay, google pay, ... . Also, banking business is quite far removed from what they are doing and hard to do while being a non-profit.

Re: Firefox’s Fight for the Future of the Web

#282

Post by lcall »

AsyncAwait wrote: post #209
lcall wrote: post #192

I hope Firefox succeeds, as I like the idea of not concentrating yet more power in few hands, but, on OpenBSD, I use Iridium (Chromium derivative), so I see these benefits, and am wondering what Firefox would add for me, privacy- and security-wise: 1) Iridium doesn't send info to Google like Chrome does (or that is the idea); 2) It is easier (last I checked) than with Firefox to leave some config tabs open so I can q…

You're still on Blink. Contributing to that monoculture is no win.

I think this is among the best reasons I've heard in this discussion to avoid Chrome. The other reasons to not use firefox (at least for me on OBSD for now, given that pledge/unveil support for FF are still in progress, and no way I know to use exception lists for images/cookies/javascript without an external plugin), might still outweigh it.

Re: Firefox’s Fight for the Future of the Web

#283

Post by lcall »

santicalcagno wrote: post #249
lcall wrote: post #192

I hope Firefox succeeds, as I like the idea of not concentrating yet more power in few hands, but, on OpenBSD, I use Iridium (Chromium derivative), so I see these benefits, and am wondering what Firefox would add for me, privacy- and security-wise: 1) Iridium doesn't send info to Google like Chrome does (or that is the idea); 2) It is easier (last I checked) than with Firefox to leave some config tabs open so I can q…

> 3) OpenBSD adds pledge/unveil system calls from the browser, to prevent it from reading/writing files where it should not (plus I browse under a different user than I do other things with high confidence there will not be a privilege escalation; also they say the pledge/unveil support is easier to implement in Chrome/Iridium than in Firefox because of the cleaner separations of concerns in the code organization (my…

More I just saw, haven't read thoroughly yet: http://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article;sid=20191118055603

Re: Firefox’s Fight for the Future of the Web

#284

Post by lcall »

lcall wrote: post #192

I hope Firefox succeeds, as I like the idea of not concentrating yet more power in few hands, but, on OpenBSD, I use Iridium (Chromium derivative), so I see these benefits, and am wondering what Firefox would add for me, privacy- and security-wise: 1) Iridium doesn't send info to Google like Chrome does (or that is the idea); 2) It is easier (last I checked) than with Firefox to leave some config tabs open so I can q…

I thought of another way to put a reason I am not quite moving to FF yet: If I change my habits around browser use, over to FF, then switch platforms, I again get DNS-over-HTTP (or DoH) which I think I don't want the browser to decide for me, preferring to make that decision at the user or system level as I have done with my non-expert use of DNSSEC on my desktop, which is at the system level. Sending all DNS queries to a single location is another concentration of power. Or, is DoH user-configurable in FF?

So, summarizing, pros/cons as I see them for my usage:

Iridium/Chromium pros:

- ability to create exception lists by domain for JS, images, cookies is built in in a way I know of, without adding plugins or extensions that might get less code review or bought by a malicious maintainer w/o my knowledge (maybe rare, but has been reported for some).

- if I switch platforms and continue with my current usage habits I am not forced into DoH (yet?).

- has pledge/unveil support (limiting risk today on a platform I trust more to do that right, with fewer privilege escalation bugs etc and less complexity/knowledge required than SELinux etc. (many fewer zero-days at the OS level).

Firefox pros:

- avoids mononoculture (a big one).

- Maybe has fewer zero-day bugs than Chromium or the older Iridium (at the user and application level only).

- will probably have OBSD pledge/unveil support in the next OBSD release or sooner.

- Does not send metrics (or other tracking) to Google in the current version (true? I actually don't know, I might have read some accusation that I didn't investigate)? (Does not apply when comparing to Iridium, but that seems to lag Chromium bugfixes by some months.)

I plan to think about weighting these for myself. Corrections welcome on whatever I have missed or forgotten. Thanks much for the discussion.

Re: Firefox’s Fight for the Future of the Web

#285

Post by chrisseaton »

notacoward wrote: post #276
chrisseaton wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Lack of JIT doesn't slow down pages much. So why do you think so many major companies invest such a huge amount of money in JS JITs? Google, Apple, Microsoft, Oracle, Mozilla all maintain JS JITs and spend what I guess is hundreds of millions of dollars a year on it.

A budget of $100M, with 50% devoted to salary and a median salary of $250K, would be 200 developers. I seriously doubt any of the companies you name are devoting even a quarter of that to JS JIT development. Yes, they each make significant investments, but let's not weaken the argument by indulging a penchant for hyperbole.

About 200 seems about right to me across all these companies. Have you worked on one of these teams?

> let's not weaken the argument by indulging a penchant for hyperbole

Please don’t be so dismissive and snide - there’s no need for that.

Re: Firefox’s Fight for the Future of the Web

#286

Post by thekingofh »

saagarjha wrote: post #219
thekingofh wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you mean that you can have interpreted javascript, just not JIT compilers. They don't allow you to mark memory as executable. That syscall is completely disabled on their systems.

It is not, moprotect (and mach_vm_protect) work just fine if you have the appropriate entitlements or have a way of getting around its checks.

I think the entitlements are not offered to apps such as firefox and those that are not Apple correct?

Re: Firefox’s Fight for the Future of the Web

#287

Post by TheCoelacanth »

alwillis wrote: post #222
throwGuardian wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are literally zero browser engines allowed on iOS, other than Safari/webkit, with a purposefully depleted feature set, to force developers and users to the app store. It is astounding that overzealous Apple employees and fan boys will employ circuitous mental gymnastics to substantiate Apple policies, instead of simply allowing an open-market to thrive on iOS. It's as if open markets where consumers are allowed…

>There are literally zero browser engines allowed on iOS, other than Safari/webkit, with a purposefully depleted feature set, to force developers and users to the app store. Apple is clearly moving towards a more secure set of operating systems and that starts by reducing the attack surface. On macOS, Apple is deprecating kernel extensions; the boot partition on macOS Catalina is read-only so that it can’t be modifie…

> >instead of simply allowing an open-market to thrive on iOS.

> The App Store paid developers $34 billion in 2018; I would say the market is thriving: https://fortune.com/2019/01/28/apple-app-store-developer-ear....

They said open market. Apple's closed market is thriving, but the open market doesn't exist on iOS.

Re: Firefox’s Fight for the Future of the Web

#288

Post by thekingofh »

vbezhenar wrote: post #210
thekingofh wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you mean that you can have interpreted javascript, just not JIT compilers. They don't allow you to mark memory as executable. That syscall is completely disabled on their systems.

It can't be disabled because Safari and Webkit uses JIT for JavaScript. Probably it's enabled for apps signed by Apple.

True it is disabled if you aren't Apple.

Re: Firefox’s Fight for the Future of the Web

#289

Post by thekingofh »

reubenmorais wrote: post #22
radarsat1 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is it technically enforced though, I am curious. I mean, if I wrote an application that downloaded text files and rendered the text to the screen, I am sure that would be possible. If I wanted to add images to draw next to the text I am sure it is feasible. So how can one technically prohibit doing that? Implementation-wise, how is a web browser really that different from e.g. a video game? Or is it only policy-e…

I don't know the details first hand, so take this with a grain of salt, but this is what I remember from talking to engineers who explored this possibility over the years: You can't ship a native JIT (execute native code from the heap), I think it's enforced automatically by the App Store. So shipping your own JavaScript engine is out. You can't download and interpret third-party code, I think this is enforced by hum…

Thanks for the information. That part about disallowing third-party code interpreting is particularly painful to hear. They shut down any possibility of another browser. Could see that they do this for security reasons because a badly implemented interpreter could open up holes, but I'd imagine the sandbox is sufficient to allow at least interpreters.

Re: Firefox’s Fight for the Future of the Web

#290

Post by soulofmischief »

lcall wrote: post #261
soulofmischief wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

about:preferences is a tab now, too. Cookie options could be maybe a wee bit more complex, however an addon will make up the difference. > I don't know fully, but for any of those I definitely have to think more, as the user, and there is (probably?) more room for error due to complexity. On a properly configured distribution, these things should all just work out of the box. Honestly, barring the update frequency is…

Which Linux distributions configure any browsers (reliably, by default, without me having to know extra stuff) so that it cannot read or write files from any directories the user has access to (allowing, say, only /tmp and ~/Downloads and ~/.cache or the like), and so that if it makes inappropriate system calls (any except those on a whitelist) they fail? As a longtime (and grateful) Debian user, I remain impressed w…

I certainly don't meant to claim that Linux is more secure than OpenBSD. OpenBSD's security is better in several respects. I'm just trying to keep this about the browsers themselves.
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