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Niten

Firefox's security is still nowhere near up to par, unfortunately.

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156 CVEs in Firefox this year compared to 133 in Chrome. Worse, but not ‘nowhere near up to par’.

Some relevant, interesting, material on counting CVEs:

https://plus.google.com/u/0/+JustinSchuh/posts/CNEgtJWYTb5

http://lcamtuf.blogspot.com/2010/05/vulnerability-databases-...

Good points there, will bear in mind in the future.

CVE counting is a poor proxy for actual security. A browser that does not sandbox its renderers or enforce a permissions model on its extensions cannot reasonably be considered secure in 2015.

> enforce a permissions model on its extensions

Why? Surely as with any software one should only install extensions that one trusts?

You trusted it, but you were wrong

Then neither is Chrome. If you want security you probably want to look into Servo.

No, Chrome has a materially better security architecture than Firefox.

https://seclab.stanford.edu/websec/chromium/chromium-securit...

When it's ready, hopefully Servo will be used as the basis for a browser that can provide security comparable to Chrome. But there's much more to that comprehensive goal than just writing a renderer in Rust.

> But there's much more to that comprehensive goal than just writing a renderer in Rust.

Which is why the latest Servo builds have very strict sandboxing. People assume that Servo's security story is "just write it in Rust and it'll magically be secure". In reality, nobody on the team is that naive. The goal is to create a browser engine that achieves and significantly exceeds the state of the art. The architecture for that exists right now.

The architecture may exist, by Servo as a day-to-day usable browser does not yet. Don't get me wrong; I absolutely look forward to the day that it does.

Neat that they have a sandbox up and running, though. I wasn't aware of that. Is there a paper somewhere I can read about their sandbox architecture?

There is no paper per se, but you can look at the code (including readme) for the sandbox here: https://github.com/pcwalton/gaol

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