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Comment by xtalh | Hacker News Reader

It's worse than Chrome in every way. For example the privsep system is a joke.

That's not to say that Chrome can't have an RCE but of course you don't have the same chances if the browser is much more secure. And if you work in an environment like Coinbase's you really should not take chances.

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Are we forgetting that Chrome had a zero-day literally three months ago?

https://securingtomorrow.mcafee.com/other-blogs/mcafee-labs/...

> Google is aware of reports that an exploit for CVE-2019-5786 exists in the wild.

While I'm a Firefox user, that's actually evidence to xtalh's point: that bug by itself is useless, because Chrome's sandbox meant that taking over the rendering process is not enough. They only managed to escape on Windows 7, thanks to another bug (in Windows itself - CVE-2019-0808).

Note that Firefox has a sandbox too (in fact, it shares a good bit of code with that of Chrome), and therefore a sandbox escape is necessary to elevate privileges.

(NB: I have no knowledge of the details of this specific bug.)

Leaving aside whether it makes sense to call something "useless" that was actually used in the wild, the original article specifically mentions (twice) that the Firefox RCE 0-day was also sandboxed and also only managed to escape thanks to another 0-day.

(And I'm actually a Chrome user, for now.)

You almost make it sound like Chrome weren't written in C++, or that the typical Chrome install weren't hosted on a few 10s of millions of lines of C/C++

Probably because 85% of the browser market it's Chromium-based, while the rest is not. Hence, a smaller attack surface.

That's not what "attack surface" means. Firefox would have a smaller attack surface if it supported fewer file formats or protocols or such than Chrome.

True. A smaller target base would have been the correct term.

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