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Comment by vorticalbox | Hacker News Reader

its just a different attack surface for safari they would need to blackbox attack the browser which is much harder than what they did her

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What? The js engine in Safari is open source, they can put Claude to work on it any time they want.

There's much more to a browser than JS engine.

They picked to most open-source one.

WebKit is not open source?

Sure there are closed source parts of Safari, but I'd guess at least 90% of safari attack surface is in WebKit and it's parts.

In many cases, the difference between a bug and an attack vector lies in the closed source areas.

This is going to be the case automating attack detection against most programs where a portion is obscured.

However, Firefox also needs to use the closed source OS when running on Windows or macOS.

There are also WebKit-based Linux browsers, which obviously do not use closed-source OS interfaces.

My pessimistic guess on reasoning is that they suspected Firefox to have more tech debt.

>In many cases, the difference between a bug and an attack vector lies in the closed source areas.

You say many cases, let's see some examples in Safari.

Here's a rough break down, formatted best I can for HN:

  Safari (closed source)
   ├─ UI / tabs / preferences
   ├─ macOS / iOS integration
   └─ WebKit framework (open source) ~60%
        ├─ WebCore (HTML/CSS/DOM)
        ├─ JavaScriptCore (JS engine)
        └─ Web Inspector

Apple is not the kind of company that typically does these things, even if the entire Safari is open source.

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