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Comment by beaconfield | Hacker News Reader

From Peter Bright at Ars: "And security remains a pressing concern, prompting the use of new techniques to protect against exploitation. Some of the rebuilt portions are even using Mozilla's new Rust programming language, which is designed to offer improved security compared to C++.

While today's release represents a major step forward in the browser's performance and reliability, work on Quantum continues. One major weakness of Firefox, relative to Chrome and Edge, is its use of sandboxing and process isolation to limit the impact that security flaws can have. Next year Mozilla will be working to improve these areas. Early next year should also see the rollout of a new GPU-accelerated rendering engine."

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One major weakness of Firefox, relative to Chrome and Edge, is its use of sandboxing and process isolation to limit the impact that security flaws can have. Next year Mozilla will be working to improve these areas.

Firefox has been shipping with a sandbox for a while, let alone e10s. Is that an old post?

It is not a binary choice; there are sandboxes and then there are sandboxes. For example, a VM is a stricter sandbox than a container is a stricter sandbox than a chroot is better than nothing.

For sure. But he doesn't go into any details where he think the advantage would lie, which I think conflicts with calling it a "major weakness".

> Early next year should also see the rollout of a new GPU-accelerated rendering engine

So what version will get Webrender exactly?

59 AFAIK

Thanks!

That's a rough guess; the 59 cycle just started, but it's still opt-in, not on by default. But we can say for sure it will be at least 59.

Where did you get that info? I'm running Nightly (v59) but it's not enabled by default. Can't find anything on their roadmap either.

Version numbers in Nightly should be treated as works in progress, as it's built straight from the working Firefox source tree. When the current cycle ends, the code in Nightly will be bundled up to become the 59 release, and the Nightly version number will tick over to 60. Nightly displaying the 59 version number doesn't mean all features of the 59 release are present there yet.

In the nightly you need to enable it in about:config. I.e. it ships both Webrender and Gecko engine.

For the adventurous:

1) open about:config 2) set gfx.webrender.enabled to true 3) restart Nightly

For the even more adventurous:

1) open about:config 2) set gfx.webrender.enabled to true 3) set gfx.webrendest.enabled to true 4) restart Nightly

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