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I want to draw one's attention to the (at this point impressive) number of CVEs related to memory issues in Chromium's C++ codebase: https://chromereleases.goog

I want to draw one's attention to the (at this point impressive) number of CVEs related to memory issues in Chromium's C++ codebase: https://chromereleases.googleblog.com/search/label/Stable%20updates https://chromereleases.googleblog.com/search/label/Stable%20... and control-f for CVE Even granting that some of them come from dependent libraries, if the world's arguably best funded software engineering organization can't keep C++ footguns out of an application that runs untrusted code on the regular ... one may want to have a think about whether C++ is the best tool for that purpose

izacus 3y ago
So what's the monetary value of not having those CVEs? How did any of that actually touch users beyond having to wait a bit for Chrome to autoupdate?
- mdaniel 3y ago
  https://search.brave.com/news?q=chrome%20exploit%20in%20the%20wild https://search.brave.com/news?q=chrome%20exploit%20in%20the%... I'm delighted to hear that you (and I) were not personally impacted by those but to say "I didn't get in a crash, who cares about seat belts working" is comically misguided Also your "for Chrome to autoupdate" perspective makes me wish I could search for every single red Update screenshot I've seen in presentations or Zoom meetings
  - izacus 3y ago
    Again, how did that materially affect users to the point they'd switch?
toyg 3y ago
The point is that all this is not seen as valuable by users and market leaders. You don't gain marketshare in b2c by saying "my gizmo is more memory-safe than other gizmos", you have to show features. Chrome's process-separation was a feature: you could easily dispose of non-responsive pages, which other browsers couldn't do as well. Even then, it wasn't really why Chrome took off - it took off because of deep integration with Google's ecosystem, incessant marketing efforts, and monopolistic behaviour (Google "unwittingly" breaking GMail and other G products on other browsers, on a regular basis). So what feature would full memory-safety actually enable? I suspect that's the bit that the Servo folks couldn't articulate well enough.
- deleted 3y ago
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izacus 3y ago

So what's the monetary value of not having those CVEs? How did any of that actually touch users beyond having to wait a bit for Chrome to autoupdate?

mdaniel 3y ago
https://search.brave.com/news?q=chrome%20exploit%20in%20the%20wild https://search.brave.com/news?q=chrome%20exploit%20in%20the%... I'm delighted to hear that you (and I) were not personally impacted by those but to say "I didn't get in a crash, who cares about seat belts working" is comically misguided Also your "for Chrome to autoupdate" perspective makes me wish I could search for every single red Update screenshot I've seen in presentations or Zoom meetings
- izacus 3y ago
  Again, how did that materially affect users to the point they'd switch?

toyg 3y ago

The point is that all this is not seen as valuable by users and market leaders. You don't gain marketshare in b2c by saying "my gizmo is more memory-safe than other gizmos", you have to show features. Chrome's process-separation was a feature: you could easily dispose of non-responsive pages, which other browsers couldn't do as well. Even then, it wasn't really why Chrome took off - it took off because of deep integration with Google's ecosystem, incessant marketing efforts, and monopolistic behaviour (Google "unwittingly" breaking GMail and other G products on other browsers, on a regular basis). So what feature would full memory-safety actually enable? I suspect that's the bit that the Servo folks couldn't articulate well enough.

deleted 3y ago
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