My claim is that Chrome is an interesting case study in the most hardened user-facing C++ codebase in the world being hacked because of memory unsafety.
I also think that the strawman argument you've made is extremely weak for other reasons. This whole "insecure by design" thing is nonsense - everyone stating this seems to not understand that multitenant systems have existed for ages, under far more difficult constraints. An example - AWS Lambdas colocate your code with other companies' on the same hardware - if this were such an impossible task, that wouldn't be possible.
But again, my argument is not about browsers, or even much about languages, and is merely me pointing out an interesting case where memory unsafety was the root cause of an attack, despite great efforts.
a) most codebases aren't even nearly this complex
b) no one will likely write such a codebase again
So the entire "point" is just trivia. It can't be used to decide whether to program something in C++, it can't be used to decide whether to use Chrome, it's not actionable at all.
Frankly I'm peeved that a superficial comment triggered such a long discussion and monopolised the top spot in the thread instead of making space for technical explanations or more interesting discussion.
That you have failed to do so is not my issue. Don't blame me for having an upvoted post.
That is very false.
An application that:
a) has downloading and executing untrusted code as its main feature
b) supports a ton of media formats, with DRM to boot
c) is going through rapid changes, including adding very complex low-level features like WebUSB, WebGL or WebAssembly.
... will be insecure by design.
It's also very likely that no one will create a browser in C++ again, or in any other language for that matter. Microsoft recently gave up and decided to use Chromium, Opera gave up a long time ago. Chromium itself was forked from WebKit, which is used by Safari. Firefox is the only odd one out, slowly but surely sliding into irrelevance.