mirror of
https://git.sr.ht/~seirdy/seirdy.one
synced 2024-11-10 00:12:09 +00:00
20 lines
1.7 KiB
Markdown
20 lines
1.7 KiB
Markdown
|
---
|
||
|
|
title: "Flatpak and web browsers"
|
||
|
|
date: 2022-06-12T16:24:49-07:00
|
||
|
|
replyURI: "https://floss.social/@alcinnz/108466919900074368"
|
||
|
|
replyTitle: "The outer layer will be via FlatPak"
|
||
|
|
replyType: "SocialMediaPosting"
|
||
|
|
replyAuthor: "Adrian Cochrane"
|
||
|
|
replyAuthorURI: "https://rhapsode.adrian.geek.nz/"
|
||
|
|
---
|
||
|
|
You might want to provision namespace-based isolation for your browsers. But that could throw a wrench into Flatpak-based distribution.
|
||
|
|
|
||
|
|
When distributing browsers through Flatpak, things get a bit...weird. Nesting sandboxes in Flatpak doesn't really work, since Flatpak forbids access to user namespaces.
|
||
|
|
|
||
|
|
For Chromium, they worked around this by patching Chromium zygote process (the process that provisions sandboxes) to call a Flatpak supervisor to create additional sandboxes. This is called the "spawn strategy". Chromium uses a two-layer sandbox: layer-2 is a syscall allow-list and layer-1 is everything else. The only problem is that Flatpak's layer-1 sandboxes are more permissive than Chromium's native layer-1 sandboxes, so the Chromium Flatpak has weaker sandboxing.
|
||
|
|
|
||
|
|
Firefox's sandboxing isn't entirely dependent on user namespaces, but it is weakened a bit without them; there's no "spawn strategy" implemented at the moment. More info is [on Bugzilla](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1756236).
|
||
|
|
|
||
|
|
Now, whether this matters is something I can't decide for you. My personal opinion is that Flatpak serves as a tool to package, deliver, and sandbox native applications; Web browsers are tools that deliver and sandbox Web applications. Distributing a browser through Flatpak is like distributing Flatpak itself through Flatpak. Web browsers are an _alternative_ to Flatpak; they have their own sandboxing and updating mechanisms.
|
||
|
|
|