Firefox - the Aurora and beta channels

This is all Daveski's fault. He insists on visiting a particular "tech" site. I've tried to dissuade him but he just won't listen. Claims it pops up in his "feed" or whatever.

That apart, from what I understand, Chrome was built keeping process separation and sandboxing as major must-haves from the start. It will not at all be easy for Mozilla to introduce these features so late in the game unless they're prepared to go in for a major, major code rewrite.

 

Well I don't know about all that but yes Chrome was built with the multiprocess architecture in mind. Refitting Firefox to work with it would be very very difficult.

As they said, sandboxing isn't a silver bullet. Logical holes happen, code holes happen.

The security dev stated that he likes code level security ie: strong language, which is why they've been working on Rust. C/C++ is awful for security. I personally prefer policy but that's me.

 

Yeah, Mozilla would need to do an entire rewrite of the browser. Unfortunately I don't see it happening.

 

If they rewrote Firefox in Rust with sandboxing I'd probably switch over.

That'll be years though. Developing a new language takes time.

 

I'd go back to if that happened.

I guess it’s possible they’ll do it at some point but I’d imagine that it’s a long long way off. It hasn’t been that long really since they went to the rapid release cycle so you’d think they’d have their hands full as it is let alone a whole browser rewrite, at the moment anyway.

 

OK, it probably is all my fault, it usually is. I blame my Google feed reader. I'm only reporting what I get from that. I thought you guys were Google fans. LOL

Well, I should imagine that they have a contingency plan ... of sorts.

 

I was being a tad ironic.

 

They are making progress with Rust. See also http://www.rust-lang.org/

 

Ada is already a well established language with a 2012 revision date. Rust and Ada are similar in a lot of ways - static typing, at least some type inference, concurrency (improved in 2012 revision), and some other stuff.

If Rust can somehow come out within the next 2-4 years maybe I'll use it but otherwise if I want to write something securely I'll just use Ada. I'd rather use Rust, which feels a lot more modern, but... I'd rather go with the established language.

We'll see.

I hope that Rust becomes what Ada couldnt be but I see issues.

 

I will never forgive Chrome for starting the version number nonsense. I look forward to Firefox v876 being announced in a few months Thank god IE and Safari haven't followed the insanity of a new major version every week.

 

Firefox's extension system (based on XUL) is light years ahead of Chrome, if I had to choose between tab isolation or extensions the choice is easy for me. Since Firefox runs plugins in separate process, it's much less of an issue anyway.

 

This just isn't true.

In a single version Firefox will implement an entirely different mechanism for garbage control on top of other things.

In Chrome there's something big every release - a new GPU accelerated layer - and then a few other things as well.

 

One change I like in Fx 12 beta is that the "find" result is centered in the page rather than being at the last line. This allows one to see the context better in a page longer than one screen.

http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/12.0beta/releasenotes/