Google have certainly done a great job of maximizing the PR benefit from their security researchers. And it’s a great thing they’re doing. But regardless of how well individual companies market their respective security teams, Firefox has a comparable reputation for their browser engine.

Yes some of that might be thanks to PZ, but that’s beside the point, isn’t it?

Choosing Mozilla’s platform would have been better for code diversity, which has its own distinct security benefits.

I can understand value in multiple browsers for experimenting with new things (see Rust integration into Mozilla's engine), but what are the security benefits?

Like if you have 3 different crypto imlpementations, you have times more teams that have to get a thing right. It seems way easier to try and get it right just once.

Perhaps there's a holistic idea of "if one browser has an issue, at least it doesn't affect 100% of them" but given what CVEs look like in reality (often variations of the same attack across multiple programs) it seems like the cost/benefit would not be in our favor

Multiple implementations is a great way to highlight issues in the spec vs reality (assumptions, unspecified behavior, etc). If you only have one implementation, the implementation becomes the spec and you end up with people targeting compatibility for that rather than a specification.

This happened with Cisco routers back in the day, Juniper had to add a flag to make a routing protocol compatible with Cisco because Cisco implemented it wrong but had so much dominance that Juniper had no choice if they wanted to get in the game.

> what are the security benefits?

Not everyone gets hit with every attack. Biological systems work this way too.

The biggest security benefit is that competition motivates everyone to work harder, to explore alternative solutions, to raise expectations. Competition means investing in ideas like Rust and Servo.

Without serious competition you eventually get IE6.

This is flatly not true. Just dig through the CVEs and you'll see while they have a similar number of bugs Chrome's are mostly in the harmless category (browser got DOSed) where as Firefox's has had like 10x the bad category (code got executed outside the sandbox).

* Firefox has a comparable reputation for their browser engine.*

Is this really true? someone posted somewhere(can't find it) where it shows Firefox has a worst security record compared to Chrome.

Also, in the past, Firefox was left out from hacking browser competitions because it was to easy to hack.

It's not actually clear that they prioritize their own products all that much. Certainly in regards to Project Zero, it seems the point is that they are detached from the rest of the product teams. (Correct me if I'm wrong)

Outside of the security teams, I think it's actually that Chromium is much better fuzzed and scrutinized. They just have so many more resources, including those for security.

>It's not actually clear that they prioritize their own products all that much. Certainly in regards to Project Zero, it seems the point is that they are detached from the rest of the product teams. (Correct me if I'm wrong)

Most of what I've read relates to Microsoft products - and I'm not saying that Microsoft is better/worse than the rest when it comes to security.

Google is here to protect you from the lovely document reader that they forcibly mutated into a toxic app platform.

So you’d rather live in a world where all the web apps you use every day need to be installed and run with full user permissions?

The web is the safest, most battle-tested sandbox environment to run apps in. It’s so safe that you click random links all day long, running 1000s of apps and never have to worry.

I’ll take web apps over native apps from a security perspective, thank you.

I don't really think this is a problem anymore. It's more that no desktop OS provides secure native execution facilities a la iOS. The web browser was the best solution for sandboxing web applications in 1995-200x, but now CPUs have multiple cores, virtualization extensions, systems with multiple gigabytes of ram, etc.

There are better ways to sandbox applications in 2020.

As an interesting counterpoint, since iOS sideloading became semi-possible around 2014, there have been many more app-based Jailbreaks than Safari-based Jailbreaks.

This is true despite the fact that on iOS, sideloading custom apps without a developer account is extraordinarily inconvenient.

I'm so sorry to respond so late; I would just like to point out "the cloud," and the fact that there have been very few hypervisor escapes. Just because there are more app-based Jailbreaks on iOS has little to do with what is technically possible given the hardware (recent Intel missteps notwithstanding).

Personally, I'd rather live in a world where you could tell a web app from a document before you opened it. No need for apps to be native, but on a different protocol.

Totally. The hell of security issues is what makes IE a terrible product.