this post was submitted on 25 Oct 2023
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Technology
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So f’ing mad at Apple for forcing Firefox to use Apple’s WebKit on mobile instead of Gecko.
A monopolist corporation standing in the way of security sounds like Microsoft forcing everyone to use IE, but worse because of the walled garden that is iOS.
True but it might be one of the few reasons websites are even optimised for something else than chrome these days.
The difference is: Microsoft never forced, they just nudged users very aggressively. They got into trouble for that multiple times and needed to adjust their practices (but keep trying). For some reason, nothing ever happened to Apple (yet). In my opinion, tech media is way too lenient on this as well.
This is not just bad because of privacy, Safari has been slowing down progress on many web apis for years. Other browser implementations would also probably be faster and/or drain less battery. I could probably come up with even more reasons.
Gecko has its own problems. Installing Gecko would fix that webkit security breach for sure, but you would end up with gecko's security breach. So in the end it doesn't change anything.
Actually it does, because you have options if a 0-day surfaces. Your logic only works if there happen to be multiple 0-days released at the same time on all major browsers which affect all recent versions for each browser (because on iOS, you can't even downgrade to a previous version that could be unaffected). That will probably never happen.
0-days that we know of
There definitely are 0-days in every major browser engines.
As a matter of fact, Mozilla is probably working on a 0-day breach that haven’t been published by security watchdogs yet.
In the meantime, that particular WebKit breach has already been patched.
There’s no point skipping places when everything is on fire. The only thing you can do is going where it’s safer on average and stay there.
Of course there are unreleased 0-days, but you can't do anything about it. Most of them are even kept secret by companies that sell spy software. However, public 0-days are way more dangerous because they are being exploited actively.
Using a different browser until a particular issue is fixed when you are e.g. a journalist still helps with getting hacked.
And that's exactly my point.
Actually no. Because you never know what currently unfixed 0-day is actively exploited in any browser. Using Gecko or Chromium today because Webkit had a security flaw yesterday doesn't make anything safer. It might comfort you, but that's it.
The only important metric is the number of 0-day discovered per year per engine. It's a matter of probability.
Changing engine would be like changing dice because you had a bad number, without knowing how many side you'll get with the new ones.
Ah, now I got what you meant. I was just suggesting switching temporarily while the published 0-day would be public and unpatched, because this is the time in which the issue would be exploited the most.