from Hacker News

Linux sandboxing improvements in Firefox 57

by rvern on 11/11/17, 10:18 PM with 102 comments

• by alex_duf on 11/12/17, 11:36 AM

  I'm so hyped by Firefox 57, haven't felt like that about a webbrowser since Firefox 1.5

• by vermaden on 11/12/17, 9:26 PM

  People tend to assume that if Firefox 57 or other version will be faster then Chrome, then a lot people would then start to use Firefox instead of Chrome.

  As much as I would like to see that its not gonna happen, and I am writing this as a Firefox user.

  Remember what 'REAL' Opera 12 did in its times comparing to Chrome or Firefox? It loaded pages faster, used less memory, was most standards compliant and also came with bundled torrent client, and mail client and RSS client and ... and having 100+ tabs opened DID NOT EVEN SLOWED IT!

  ... and guess what, both Firefox and Chrome had more users while Opera had about 4-5%.

  It did not mattered if it was faster or better.

  Currently Opera is just a Chrome with different skin, so I moved to Firefox with Midori and Iridium as 'backups'.

• by dm319 on 11/12/17, 9:33 AM

  Can anyone tell me how secure web browsers are on linux generally. I was looking at the pwn2own results and was quite impressed with the edge compromise that got out of the host OS it was running in. However, I didn't see any web browsers on linux being compromised - is that because it is harder, or no-one bothered?

• by beefhash on 11/12/17, 1:20 PM

  I feel like I should point out that Firefox won't be getting backported to Debian stable[1]. Until the next Debian stable, it seems that Firefox ESR 52 will be the only version of Firefox.

  [1] https://mozilla.debian.net/

• by k__ on 11/12/17, 9:55 PM

  OT: Do the Quantum changes get into the Android version or is this a completly different software?

• by shmerl on 11/12/17, 7:23 AM

  > We could not block the web content rendering entirely from reading the filesystem because Firefox still uses GTK directly - we draw webpage HTML widgets using the same theming as the native desktop.

  Is there a way to build Firefox without GTK? For example for something like Plasma Mobile? It would be good if there was some fallback mode where Firefox would render UI elements using HTML itself, without relying on UI toolkits.

• by WalterGR on 11/12/17, 8:33 AM

  How does this compare to IE's Protect Mode, Enhanced Protection Mode, and Edge's execution in an app container?

• by ComodoHacker on 11/12/17, 8:24 AM

    security.sandbox.content.read_path_whitelist
  

  Are extensions allowed to change that?

• by nimbius on 11/12/17, 3:58 PM

  I've not been inclined to use this browser since they started with pocket, moved to offering a voice and video chat service, forced PulseAudio as a mandatory dependency and eventually enacted mandatory opt-in telemetry in the browser.

  sandboxing is great, but if the site is spooky enough im just going to load it in elinks/lynx and grok the text. Chromium also has sandboxing, and if youre really paranoid enough, surf from suckless.org is a webkit style do-it-yourself browser thats fairly reliable.