this post was submitted on 18 Jun 2024
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I heard around the internet that Firefox on Android does not have Site Isolation built-in yet. After a little bit of research, I learned that Site Isolation on Android was added in Firefox Nightly, appearing to have been added sometime in June 2023. What I can't find, though, is whether this has ever been added to any stable versions of Firefox yet. Does anyone know anything about this?

Update: After further research, it appears that Site Isolation is not currently a feature in stable version of Firefox on Android. I don't know with certainty if their information is up-to-date, but GrapheneOS (A well-known privacy/security-focused fork of Android) does not recommend using Firefox-based browsers on Android due to it's (apparently) lack of a Site Isolation feature. A snippet of what Graphene currently have to say about Firefox on Android/GrapheneOS from their usage guide page, is: "Avoid Gecko-based browsers like Firefox as they're currently much more vulnerable to exploitation and inherently add a huge amount of attack surface."

On a side-note, they also say about Firefox's current Site Isolation on desktop being weaker, which I wasn't aware of. "Even in the desktop version, Firefox's sandbox is still substantially weaker (especially on Linux) and lacks full support for isolating sites from each other rather than only containing content as a whole."

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[–] DreitonLullaby@lemmy.ml 1 points 4 months ago (1 children)

I'm not taking sides because I don't currently have time or energy to look into the issues GrapheneOS and/or Micay may or may not have, but I will say that I don't know how you could think (at least based on the information I referenced from Graphene in my post) that they are saying or implying to people that Firefox is less secure. They did say it was inherently less secure on Android, but not in general. They did say that the Site Isolation feature specifically is less secure even on Desktop, but they didn't say that Firefox as a whole is inherently less secure, just that it currently is on Android. I can see how an average reader may interpret that as Firefox being less secure than Chromium as a whole, but that would simply be their own misinterpretation of what's being said.

and "The moment anyone starts calling Firefox insecure, immediately become alert". Why? Anything is capable of being insecure and Firefox equally so. At any given time, Firefox could have security vulnerabilities (as it does), so it's quite ridiculous to automatically assume that anyone calling Firefox out for being insecure in some way is just Daniel Micay or his "minions"

"Micay and GrapheneOS, and fans/members associated like OP are well known for...". Are you accusing me of being associated with Micay and GrapheneOS, or am I misunderstanding you?