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.
waitwhatwhoa 4 hours ago [-]
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.
nicoburns 5 hours ago [-]
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.
nolist_policy 3 hours ago [-]
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.
josefx 4 hours ago [-]
Didn't some get exploited early on because electron made it trivial to load third party websites without any kind of XSS protection?
panzi 5 hours ago [-]
Just wanted to write the same comment!
dataflow 5 hours ago [-]
> 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?
xeeeeeeeeeeenu 4 hours ago [-]
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.
superjan 4 hours ago [-]
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.
quantumleaper 5 hours ago [-]
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.
Please don’t use green/red schemes, it’s the most common form of colorblindness and it’s especially bad with such pale shades.
sgtlaggy 3 hours 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.
richwater 3 hours ago [-]
This website, while cool data, is just awful for me who is very red/green colorblind. Unusable.
skaul 2 hours ago [-]
Sorry about that! I've fixed the colors and contrast now.
xandrius 4 hours ago [-]
It has text supporting the color, so it's fine.
richwater 3 hours ago [-]
Some of the text is undereadable on the background.
skaul 2 hours ago [-]
Thanks, fixed now.
shooly 4 hours ago [-]
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?
magpi3 4 hours ago [-]
White with black text for success and black with white text for failure. People would figure it out.
shooly 4 hours ago [-]
So as I said instead of confusing a minority of people, we confuse everyone instead?
magpi3 3 hours ago [-]
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.
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.
ccouzens 2 hours ago [-]
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.
mm263 5 hours ago [-]
Please add Helium
wswin 5 hours ago [-]
and Ungoogled Chromium
dotcoma 4 hours ago [-]
Helium rocks!
Yehoshaphat 5 hours ago [-]
I second this motion.
mostlyk 4 hours ago [-]
I third this motion.
ece 4 hours ago [-]
qutebrowser would be nice too.
nofunsir 1 hours ago [-]
What if I see a browser being "behind" as a benefit? (CVEs excepted)
darkwater 3 hours ago [-]
I use Firefox, btw
ciupicri 3 hours ago [-]
Firefox has its own forks, by the way: GNU IceWeasel → IceCat, LibreWolf etc.
dizhn 2 hours ago [-]
The page says old chromium means insecure. Isn't anybody backporting fixes anymore?
skaul 2 hours ago [-]
Credit to bsclifton for the idea!
Retr0id 4 hours ago [-]
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)
Shouldn't it also show the version number of the browser the user is currently on?
koolala 5 hours ago [-]
Which user?
catlikesshrimp 4 hours ago [-]
The one visiting the website (tfa website)
koolala 4 hours ago [-]
Why? What does tfa mean? I'm visiting it on Firefox.
edoceo 4 hours ago [-]
TFA is: The Fantastic Article. The top thing that was posted.
koolala 5 hours ago [-]
Could add the Meta Quest browser
ece 4 hours ago [-]
Vivaldi does minor releases as needed for security and bugs, so saying 1 major version behind is a bit coarse.
shevy-java 3 hours ago [-]
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.
TheDong 5 minutes ago [-]
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.
Fokamul 4 hours ago [-]
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.
notenlish 2 hours ago [-]
> lawmakers US/EU/Anywhere else, should force all browsers to actively block fingerprinting.
That won't happen.
shooly 4 hours ago [-]
What fingerprinting? What does this have to do with anything?
crazysim 5 hours ago [-]
[dead]
Rendered at 22:38:56 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
1. https://www.usenix.org/system/files/usenixsecurity24-ali.pdf 2. https://github.com/masood/inspectron
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.
> users are exposed to known, already-patched security vulnerabilities
Then why only focus on major versions? Don't minor versions/revisions have security fixes?
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...
https://chromestatus.com/roadmap
[1] https://developer.chrome.com/blog/chrome-two-week-release
Firefox's dev tools have an Accessibility tab where you can see warnings about low contrast and simulate different forms of color blindness.
Using any other color scheme would just confuse everyone instead of only colorblind people... how would that be any better?
https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src.git/+/main/do...
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)
Edit: approximately like so:
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.
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.
Yet another reminder, lawmakers US/EU/Anywhere else, should force all browsers to actively block fingerprinting.
That won't happen.