He works (or recently worked) for Mozilla on security-related projects. The code commit fixing the issue was isolated to the /dom/ directory in the source tree, and Firefox does not support CSS Animation Timelines. The Animation Timelines code is not directly accessed by web devs, and it appears the only way to execute that code is via the JS API for Animation Timelines. I'm not a web security expert, but the signs seem to point to him being correct.

Once again, JS proves to be a security risk.

That is Firefox standalone behavior when it detects its files have been changed and differ from the ones loaded by the current instance. In theory, what snap is doing avoid changing files from a program while it is running.

Now, I don't know how your setup looks like, but I don't think anything is distributed as snaps by default on Arch. At least AFAIK its mostly an Ubuntu & derivatives thing.

Well, it was more broken in more interesting ways before they implemented the forced restart

Why go fancy? Even Python saves you from use-after-free.

It’s all have to do with resource management here.

It’s obvious that laying off people that were working hard at making more robust the flagship product of the non-profit wasn’t going to result in a an increase of security in this product. Could the whole lay-off have been prevented? That would require some number analysis here, and insights I lake.

Could at least some termination have been avoided? Freezing the income of the CEO until some agreed metrics improve, and use the amount thus spare to save some employ salary was certainly an option here, wasn’t it?

Claiming "think of my family, look how much more some other people earn elsewhere" while almost simultaneously (at organization level at least) putting so many people in a jobless position, that’s a rather bold cognitive dissonance to throw at the world to my mind.

If pointing out "odd financial priorities" of a non-profit is flame bait, one might wonder how humanity is supposed to mend all organizational dysfunctions it can ever fall into.

It’s pretty relevant considering the continued mismanagement of Mozilla.

Nobody would care about Mozilla in 2024 without Firefox, but Firefox development seemingly takes a back seat to a variety of other pet projects that Mozilla’s management tries (and keeps failing, over and over) to chase.

For example, they’ve been trying a pivot to become a community-focused privacy company the last couple of years, yet are fine with implementing ad topics.

AFAIK didn’t Safari advocate against it over privacy concerns? If so, what is Mozilla doing?

Or their partnering with a shady company for removing data from data brokers.

Before the privacy pivot, there was the “we want to make browsing better” pivot with their acquisition of Pocket that went nowhere.

From the outside Mozilla looks like a low-scoring charity grift you’d find on CharityNavigator with how far they deviate from the missions they claim to support.

both java and c# has thread safety primitives that are also pretty easy to use. E.g., the java concurrency package.

> I don't know of any browser engine in C#/Java?

A famous one is HotJava. According to Wikipedia, it was also the first web browser to support Java applets.

Why would you need to reinvent networking layer instead of just sending http requests via matrue, battle tested lib available in your programming ecosystem e.g from MSFT? Same with crypto, sockets, compression, etc?

Video and audio I mentioned.

Extensions are tricky, right, but more from privacy standpoint cuz after all you can just expose too much

Only parts of the browser are running in multiple small isolated WASM sandboxes, those WASM sandboxes are isolated from outside world about as well as if they would run in their own process.

Java applets didn't sandbox shit though, because you could call straight into your own native code via JNI (I know because I used exactly that approach to integrate a Win32 game client into browsers). The only thing that the applet launcher did was asking if it is ok to run the applet.

This is true, but adding a sandboxing to browsers has been a huge part in driving up the difficulty/cost of browser exploits, and driving down the frequency of their use.

And also we'll pay for a bypass of the wasm sandbox. (Actually, looking at our table, I'm going to try and get the bountyamount upped...)

I dunno about that? do you use more than one gpu intensive task at a time?

No, flatpack is very much not a security sandbox.

Yeah. I have to stay conscious of resource usage and can't run all the stuff I'd really want (which TBF is a bit) at 32.

The situation has indeed improved and things have gotten smoother over the past few years IME! (AMD)

If you run multiple GPUs (so one for your GUI and the rest for whatever else you want to do), PCIe passthrough for the latter is pretty straightforward these days.

You can set up a dedicated gpu qube for the former - recommended but optional.

Qubes does have answers to the device stuff, like sticking network devices in a network vm, which only talks to a firewall vm, which talks to your other vms. There is a reasonable gui interface where you can just plug devices into particular VMs for other things.

In my usage I've never felt the need to share stuff other than the network/sound/storage stuff that qubes make just work. Other devices tend to be just plug them into the particular VM that needs them. YMMV.

I would say that perhaps containers could do just as well, or some other technology. The thing qubes brings to the table is that other people are doing most of the heavy lifting to make a usable desktop out of a highly virtualized system.

There may be path dependent reasons why qubes approach isn't the best possible... but it doesn't matter because so much stuff just working is worth so much. That the compromise we always make when running a distribution... one could meta-x butterfiles and write your own kernel from scratch, or whatever. Or you can run a system created by others. Their system may have decisions you disagree with or are objectively bad, but they saved you 12 months of tinkering with the dynamic linker-- well worth it. :)

For me, the alternative of having my whole laptop compromised by some browser zero day or because a malicious party sent me some malware document was just not viable. I was already carrying two laptops for isolation, and suffering some anxiety from the residual risk. But in my case I've been targeted specifically (due to cryptocurrency bullshit), a friend and former colleague was hit with an astonishingly sophisticated attack that used stuff like BMC vulnerabilities on his web server and then traversal with X11 forwarding and stuff like that all to just break into his desktop.

So I'd probably be using qubes today even if I could only move the mouse with my tongue and the computer was slowed down to the speed for a 486sx. But the incorrect belief that it would be that kinda hit really delayed my adoption. It's a hit, it's real, but at least for my usage it was far smoother than I expected.

I think right now the only obvious wart I experience is that full screen video stutters pretty badly. So I just don't watch video full screen on the laptop now. There are things that might fix it, but I haven't bothered even trying.

There are benefits I didn't expect too. For example, The operating system image in a normal application VM isn't persistent, only your home directory. So you can just scribble all over the OS install in an app vm and it'll go away when you restart it. If you want it to be persistent you change the underlying templatevm. So to get something working I can totally take a chainsaw to my configuration confident I won't get stuck with anything broken. Once I figure out the changes I can apply just the required steps in a template.

Another benefit is that updating fedora versions is a riskless breeze--- install a new template vm. shut down your app vms, click to change template. Restart them if some particular app vm is broken, switch it back and worry about it when you have time.