I would like to see all "desktop" applications that use Electron listed and how big of a Chromium drift is there, especially how many applications are shipping runtimes with unfixed vulnerabilities.
We did a study of this a few years ago[1] and the code for the instrumentation is available on github[2], the data is dated but you can see a cross section of popular apps and how far behind they were lagging over a 3 year period on page 11 of the pdf. Re: child comment, our main concern in this research was patched vulnerabilities persisting in electron apps and how damaging that could be. Details in the paper :)
I keep getting distracted by side-quests. The last one was building an Electron Zoo, and the current one is doing accurate SBOMs for each electron version.
Yep. JavaScript VM breakout, Sandbox breakout and spectre/meltdown side channel leaks are all tracked as vulnerabilities towards Electron while ordinary apps don't even have such security features.
I guess an elephant-sized exception to this are the popular code editors that support extensions? Or perhaps such editors’ extensions typically aren’t constrained at all anyway.
Yes and also stable isn't the only maintained branch of Chromium, there's also extended stable (currently 146.x). LTS exists too (144.x), but I believe it's meant only for ChromeOS.
In a perfect world, there would be a stable version of chrome, that would get fixes, but would crucially not get the new features that introduce new vulnerabilities. Not a fun job, I know, but with today’s coding agents it wouldn’t even be an unreasonable ask.
Cool idea, but without longer-term tracking of how long each browser lags for each Chromium release, it's hard to draw any meaningful conclusions. It's also clear that in the case of major vulnerabilities, vendors would fast-track adoption of the patch.
I would definitely include the fact that "major" versions of Chromium are released every 2 weeks. For instance, Vivaldi is on version 146.0.7680.218 that released this Tuesday [1], only 5 days ago.
On the topic of accessibility, the contrast of the text in the "up to date" bubbles is very low. I can barely see the yellow one, let alone read it without significant eye strain.
Firefox's dev tools have an Accessibility tab where you can see warnings about low contrast and simulate different forms of color blindness.
There are always creative ways to present data. Dismissing the needs of a minority of people just because we don't share their visual impairment is lazy, and we can do better.
It would be good if Samsung browser were listed. It has about 10% market share of chromium browsers and is on version 136. It sticks to one version for months at a time and then jumps several versions. Going by historical data it's due for another jump soon.
This is somewhat useful, but I know for instance that Vivaldi is often one version behind for the sake of stability, but also will also release incremental security updates in the period before major version updates.
Why is Vivaldi listed as behind when it's on the extended stable branch, which is a maintained branch?
Also, aside from that, it also perpetuates a silly idea that's popular in tech which is that security patches can't be backported or added by someone who forks software.
Like, the founder of Brave is one of the OG Mozilla guys, founder of Vivaldi did Opera, Edge is MS... These aren't dumb teams.
Fennec, for Android too. The unfortunate part is that it doesn't (by default, on F-Droid) use Firefox Beta - meaning custom extension packs can't be used
This matters for things like Redirector (www.reddit -> old.reddit), Greasemonkey (hckrnews dark theme), and (for my keyboard-equipped Android) Vimium
The problem is: we all are behind Google. Google sits in the driver seat here.
This is really, really bad ...
Edit: Ok, almost all of us. There are some non-Google browsers such as firefox, but Google dished out money to Mozilla for many years, which made real competition impossible.
A lot of people are stuck with safari on iOS where there's not even another browser since apple bans them.
People choose to download Chrome over firefox, to ditch their custom browser engine (microsoft & opera) in favor of chromium.
We've centralized development effort on a large open source project.
Why exactly is this really really bad?
I find the safari situation bad because I can't use various web standards, it's closed source, etc, but the chromium one doesn't bother me. I just install firefox.
I would like to see all "desktop" applications that use Electron listed and how big of a Chromium drift is there, especially how many applications are shipping runtimes with unfixed vulnerabilities.
We did a study of this a few years ago[1] and the code for the instrumentation is available on github[2], the data is dated but you can see a cross section of popular apps and how far behind they were lagging over a 3 year period on page 11 of the pdf. Re: child comment, our main concern in this research was patched vulnerabilities persisting in electron apps and how damaging that could be. Details in the paper :)
1. https://www.usenix.org/system/files/usenixsecurity24-ali.pdf 2. https://github.com/masood/inspectron
Study URL leads to a dead page
I've been working on this over the years. WIP is here: https://github.com/captn3m0/electron-survey, and it doesn't look good.
I keep getting distracted by side-quests. The last one was building an Electron Zoo, and the current one is doing accurate SBOMs for each electron version.
I imagine that looks pretty bad. On the other hand, Electron apps often aren't running untrusted code, which makes it quite a bit harder to exploit.
Yep. JavaScript VM breakout, Sandbox breakout and spectre/meltdown side channel leaks are all tracked as vulnerabilities towards Electron while ordinary apps don't even have such security features.
I guess an elephant-sized exception to this are the popular code editors that support extensions? Or perhaps such editors’ extensions typically aren’t constrained at all anyway.
The last one. It would make sense to have a sandbox system, but they don’t.
Didn't some get exploited early on because electron made it trivial to load third party websites without any kind of XSS protection?
Isn’t the threat model for these desktop apps entirely different?
Just wanted to write the same comment!
> Why does Chromium version lag matter?
> users are exposed to known, already-patched security vulnerabilities
Then why only focus on major versions? Don't minor versions/revisions have security fixes?
Yes and also stable isn't the only maintained branch of Chromium, there's also extended stable (currently 146.x). LTS exists too (144.x), but I believe it's meant only for ChromeOS.
The Vivaldi build I have locally explicitly mentions "Extended Stable channel (may also include additional security patches)" on its "About" page.
The most recent updates says it includes the 147 security fixes too "[Chromium] Update to 146.0.7680.218 ESR (includes security fixes from 147.0.7727.137/138)" https://vivaldi.com/blog/desktop/minor-update-eight-7-9/
The website does seem fairly misleading, if you and GP are correct.
In a perfect world, there would be a stable version of chrome, that would get fixes, but would crucially not get the new features that introduce new vulnerabilities. Not a fun job, I know, but with today’s coding agents it wouldn’t even be an unreasonable ask.
In defense of Vivaldi, it is actually up to date, just on the Extended Stable cycle: https://chromiumdash.appspot.com/releases?platform=Mac
https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src.git/+/main/do...
Cool idea, but without longer-term tracking of how long each browser lags for each Chromium release, it's hard to draw any meaningful conclusions. It's also clear that in the case of major vulnerabilities, vendors would fast-track adoption of the patch.
I would definitely include the fact that "major" versions of Chromium are released every 2 weeks. For instance, Vivaldi is on version 146.0.7680.218 that released this Tuesday [1], only 5 days ago.
[1] https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/f97d14f8a0a...
More like 4 weeks than 2.
https://chromestatus.com/roadmap
You are right, I misremembered this announcement [1]. They are switching from a 4-week to a 2-week release schedule this September.
[1] https://developer.chrome.com/blog/chrome-two-week-release
Please don’t use green/red schemes, it’s the most common form of colorblindness and it’s especially bad with such pale shades.
On the topic of accessibility, the contrast of the text in the "up to date" bubbles is very low. I can barely see the yellow one, let alone read it without significant eye strain.
Firefox's dev tools have an Accessibility tab where you can see warnings about low contrast and simulate different forms of color blindness.
This website, while cool data, is just awful for me who is very red/green colorblind. Unusable.
Sorry about that! I've fixed the colors and contrast now.
thanks :)
It has text supporting the color, so it's fine.
Some of the text is undereadable on the background.
Red/green is the most common way to show bad/good, error/success, etc.
Using any other color scheme would just confuse everyone instead of only colorblind people... how would that be any better?
White with black text for success and black with white text for failure. People would figure it out.
So as I said instead of confusing a minority of people, we confuse everyone instead?
There are always creative ways to present data. Dismissing the needs of a minority of people just because we don't share their visual impairment is lazy, and we can do better.
Thanks, fixed now.
It would be good if Samsung browser were listed. It has about 10% market share of chromium browsers and is on version 136. It sticks to one version for months at a time and then jumps several versions. Going by historical data it's due for another jump soon.
This is somewhat useful, but I know for instance that Vivaldi is often one version behind for the sake of stability, but also will also release incremental security updates in the period before major version updates.
Please add Helium
and Ungoogled Chromium
Helium rocks!
qutebrowser would be nice too.
I second this motion.
I third this motion.
The page says old chromium means insecure. Isn't anybody backporting fixes anymore?
"your browser is no longer supported" is just so terribly useful, for so many ..
Is "uptodown" really the canonical download page for Comet?
A point-in-time view is interesting but it's less useful than a graph over time.
Would be fun to add the version shipped in LG smart TVs (hint: it's ancient)
It's not but given that Perplexity doesn't have an API and blocks automated downloads, I'm not sure what else to use. Explained in the docs: https://github.com/ShivanKaul/chromium-drift/blob/main/docs/...
How does comet update itself?
Edit: approximately like so:
fwiw this should work the same for just about all chromium forks - protocol is documented here: https://github.com/chromium/chromium/blob/6eb6252d5671bca378...
Why is Vivaldi listed as behind when it's on the extended stable branch, which is a maintained branch?
Also, aside from that, it also perpetuates a silly idea that's popular in tech which is that security patches can't be backported or added by someone who forks software.
Like, the founder of Brave is one of the OG Mozilla guys, founder of Vivaldi did Opera, Edge is MS... These aren't dumb teams.
I use Firefox, btw
Firefox has its own forks, by the way: GNU IceWeasel → IceCat, LibreWolf etc.
Fennec, for Android too. The unfortunate part is that it doesn't (by default, on F-Droid) use Firefox Beta - meaning custom extension packs can't be used
This matters for things like Redirector (www.reddit -> old.reddit), Greasemonkey (hckrnews dark theme), and (for my keyboard-equipped Android) Vimium
Vivaldi does minor releases as needed for security and bugs, so saying 1 major version behind is a bit coarse.
Credit to bsclifton for the idea!
Shouldn't it also show the version number of the browser the user is currently on?
Which user?
The one visiting the website (tfa website)
Why? What does tfa mean? I'm visiting it on Firefox.
TFA is: The Fantastic Article. The top thing that was posted.
What if I see a browser being "behind" as a benefit? (CVEs excepted)
The problem is: we all are behind Google. Google sits in the driver seat here.
This is really, really bad ...
Edit: Ok, almost all of us. There are some non-Google browsers such as firefox, but Google dished out money to Mozilla for many years, which made real competition impossible.
A lot of people are stuck with safari on iOS where there's not even another browser since apple bans them.
People choose to download Chrome over firefox, to ditch their custom browser engine (microsoft & opera) in favor of chromium.
We've centralized development effort on a large open source project.
Why exactly is this really really bad?
I find the safari situation bad because I can't use various web standards, it's closed source, etc, but the chromium one doesn't bother me. I just install firefox.
Why is this list missing Supermium?
Could add the Meta Quest browser
This website, for me, it's named "List of all browsers I will never use".
Yet another reminder, lawmakers US/EU/Anywhere else, should force all browsers to actively block fingerprinting.
What fingerprinting? What does this have to do with anything?
> lawmakers US/EU/Anywhere else, should force all browsers to actively block fingerprinting.
That won't happen.
[dead]