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Comment by viraptor | Hacker News Reader

Unfortunately Chrome/ium has the best security story at the moment. Mainly due to good separation/sandbox. Firefox is only now catching up, slowly. So while I'd like to use FF, it's simply not a reasonable choice for me.

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What makes you believe Chromium has better sandboxing than Firefox? That may have been true in the past, I doubt it has much truth to it today. Furthermore, if you use GNU/Linux it should be trivial to give your web browser better sandboxing than what it does by itself. (You can use AppArmor or SELinux, you can run it in a systemd-nspawn container, you can use Firejail…)

Not something that the average joe and jane can do.

Neither the article nor Hacker News are intended for the average Joe.

You right, average Joe only uses Chrome, Edge and Safari on their mobile phones and desktop computers.

But the issue itself is one that both affects and is caused by the "average Joe".

Chrome has a process for each tab that's sandboxed so that most exploits would be trapped and unable to escalate out of the sandbox. Firefox has nothing like that yet, but it's coming eventually with the new multiprocess architecture that they're ramping up.

Firefox has sandboxing for tabs as well, and has had it before e10s.

What sandbox are you referring to?

that's not how processes works...

Processes don't imply sandboxing, but once you have things split up into multiple processes there are powerful process-sandboxing tools that are available for Firefox to use in the coming future.

All of that is only marginally helpful without X sandboxing.

I agree, but the same applies to Chrome on X11.

No, I mean that even if you add additional layers of sandboxing, the chrome process can still access the X socket. A process with the ability to read and write to the X socket can record keypresses, issue mouse and key events, etc etc.

(There's not a well-supported way to avoid this, but there are some tools that use Xpra for it.)

I know. My point was that Chrome does not have a security advantage over Firefox on X11, since the discussion was about the security advantages of Chrome/Chromium over Firefox.

We are in full agreement. On X11, the security model is: every application can see/do everything. You should only run an application in X11 when you fully trust it.

> What makes you believe Chromium has better sandboxing than Firefox?

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Security/Sandbox#Linux and https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/master/docs...

There's more details than I can easily describe in a HN post, but in general read those links to learn why

> if you use GNU/Linux it should be trivial to give your web browser better sandboxing than what it does by itself

There's a difference between sandbox separating it from the system (what apparmor/selinux can do) and sandbox of each content and plugin (what browser itself can do, mostly with seccomp). Or in a practical example - why do I care that a website can't write to my home directory, if it still has full access to my bank in another tab.

e10s helps a bit, but it's still in early stages. It wasn't even enabled for everybody until 12th Sept this year. Even now, I believe (please correct me if untrue) that there's only one child for all web content, not one per tab.

Do people really get viruses through their browsers still? Can't think of that happening to anyone I know

Yes it's still a major vector. The sheer size of the code base needed for a modern browser makes for a significant surface to attack.

http://venturebeat.com/2016/03/18/pwn2own-2016-chrome-edge-a...

I've flip flopped on this over the years.

I've finally settled on this:

Why are dev tools 1-size-fits-all? What is that? I should be able to say, turn on all the tools, or just give me simple mode.

For a lot of websites I create, I would love to have:

1) Console for errors and debugging output.

2) A way to edit the source of the page I'm looking at, and any connected CSS/JS pages in a regular notepad-like editor to make real-time changes to what I'm looking at (and reload with those changes in place)

That's it. Then I can transfer my changes to my dev files and upload to the FTP server.

Then, when I'm working on some huge bloated website with all kinds of craziness, I can turn on all the tools in an advanced mode.

> Unfortunately Chrome/ium has the best security story at the moment.

And the worst privacy story and resource handling.

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