151 pointsby skaul6 hours ago19 comments
  • butz6 hours ago
    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.
    • waitwhatwhoa4 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 :)

      1. https://www.usenix.org/system/files/usenixsecurity24-ali.pdf 2. https://github.com/masood/inspectron

    • captn3m05 hours ago
      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.

    • nicoburns6 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_policy3 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.
      • josefx5 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?
    • panzi5 hours ago
      Just wanted to write the same comment!
  • dataflow6 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?

    • xeeeeeeeeeeenu5 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.
    • superjan4 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.
  • quantumleaper6 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.

    [1] https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/f97d14f8a0a...

  • pimlottc5 hours 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.
    • sgtlaggy4 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.

      • richwater3 hours ago
        This website, while cool data, is just awful for me who is very red/green colorblind. Unusable.
        • skaul3 hours ago
          Sorry about that! I've fixed the colors and contrast now.
    • xandrius4 hours ago
      It has text supporting the color, so it's fine.
      • richwater3 hours ago
        Some of the text is undereadable on the background.
    • skaul3 hours ago
      Thanks, fixed now.
    • shooly4 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?

      • magpi34 hours ago
        White with black text for success and black with white text for failure. People would figure it out.
        • shooly4 hours ago
          So as I said instead of confusing a minority of people, we confuse everyone instead?
          • magpi34 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.
  • yawndex4 hours ago
    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...

  • UberFly5 hours ago
    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.
  • ccouzens2 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.
  • mm2636 hours ago
    Please add Helium
    • wswin5 hours ago
      and Ungoogled Chromium
    • dotcoma4 hours ago
      Helium rocks!
    • Yehoshaphat5 hours ago
      I second this motion.
      • mostlyk4 hours ago
        I third this motion.
    • ece4 hours ago
      qutebrowser would be nice too.
  • darkwater4 hours ago
    I use Firefox, btw
    • ciupicri3 hours ago
      Firefox has its own forks, by the way: GNU IceWeasel → IceCat, LibreWolf etc.
  • nofunsir2 hours ago
    What if I see a browser being "behind" as a benefit? (CVEs excepted)
  • dizhn2 hours ago
    The page says old chromium means insecure. Isn't anybody backporting fixes anymore?
  • skaul2 hours ago
    Credit to bsclifton for the idea!
  • Retr0id5 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)

    • skaul3 hours ago
      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/...
      • Retr0id2 hours ago
        How does comet update itself?

        Edit: approximately like so:

            curl -sS -X POST -H 'Content-Type: application/json' -d '{"request":{"protocol":"4.0","updater":"CometUpdater","updaterversion":"0","os":{"platform":"win","version":"10","arch":"x64"},"apps":[{"appid":"{42e10078-e377-4166-965f-c14ad958a146}","version":"0.0.0.0","updatechecks":[{}]}]}}' https://www.perplexity.ai/rest/browser/update2 | sed "s/^)]}'//" | jq -r '.response.apps[0].updatecheck.nextversion'
  • jjmarr6 hours ago
    Shouldn't it also show the version number of the browser the user is currently on?
    • koolala5 hours ago
      Which user?
      • catlikesshrimp5 hours ago
        The one visiting the website (tfa website)
        • koolala4 hours ago
          Why? What does tfa mean? I'm visiting it on Firefox.
          • edoceo4 hours ago
            TFA is: The Fantastic Article. The top thing that was posted.
  • koolala5 hours ago
    Could add the Meta Quest browser
  • ece4 hours ago
    Vivaldi does minor releases as needed for security and bugs, so saying 1 major version behind is a bit coarse.
  • shevy-java4 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.

    • TheDong24 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.

  • Fokamul5 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.

    • notenlish3 hours ago
      > lawmakers US/EU/Anywhere else, should force all browsers to actively block fingerprinting.

      That won't happen.

    • shooly4 hours ago
      What fingerprinting? What does this have to do with anything?
  • crazysim6 hours ago
    [dead]