Re:WebExtensions in Firefox 48
by the8472 on Saturday April 30, 2016 @01:55PM
(#11602697)
In my eyes mozilla's stance on security is patronizing towards power-users because it assumes that every addon and every non-root application on the system is potentially hostile.
Thus the goal is to prevent free interaction between processes or between addons and native in general (unix philosophy anyone?). Everyone has to suffer just to protect those who click on "yes, install" whenever prompted.
The result are less powerful APIs in the name of security.
Just look at addon signing. Mozilla refuses to add an off switch to that (and thus user control) because they fear that some other processes already running on the user's computer might inject unsigned addons. In my eyes this is a crazy kind of threat model that basically writes off the user's system security as a lost cause and tries to defend FF against that lost cause. It's elevating mozilla's needs over interoperability between applications.
Imagine if awk refused to run unless the parent process is bash, signed by canonical, because they deemed some other shell's argument expansion as potentially confusing to the user or something like that. Crazy, right?
Thus the goal is to prevent free interaction between processes or between addons and native in general (unix philosophy anyone?). Everyone has to suffer just to protect those who click on "yes, install" whenever prompted.
The result are less powerful APIs in the name of security.
Just look at addon signing. Mozilla refuses to add an off switch to that (and thus user control) because they fear that some other processes already running on the user's computer might inject unsigned addons. In my eyes this is a crazy kind of threat model that basically writes off the user's system security as a lost cause and tries to defend FF against that lost cause. It's elevating mozilla's needs over interoperability between applications.
Imagine if awk refused to run unless the parent process is bash, signed by canonical, because they deemed some other shell's argument expansion as potentially confusing to the user or something like that. Crazy, right?