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.
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.
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.
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
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.
Didn't some get exploited early on because electron made it trivial to load third party websites without any kind of XSS protection?
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.
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.
[1] https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/f97d14f8a0a...
More like 4 weeks than 2.
https://chromestatus.com/roadmap
Please don’t use green/red schemes, it’s the most common form of colorblindness and it’s especially bad with such pale shades.
It has text supporting the color, so it's fine.
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?
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...
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.
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)
Please add Helium
and Ungoogled Chromium
Helium rocks!
qutebrowser would be nice too.
I second this motion.
I third this motion.
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.
Vivaldi does minor releases as needed for security and bugs, so saying 1 major version behind is a bit coarse.
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?