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19 lines
1.7 KiB
Markdown
19 lines
1.7 KiB
Markdown
---
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title: "Flatpak and web browsers"
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date: 2022-06-12T16:24:49-07:00
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replyURI: "https://floss.social/@alcinnz/108466919900074368"
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replyTitle: "The outer layer will be via FlatPak"
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replyType: "SocialMediaPosting"
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replyAuthor: "Adrian Cochrane"
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replyAuthorURI: "https://adrian.geek.nz/"
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---
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You might want to provision namespace-based isolation for your browsers. But that could throw a wrench into Flatpak-based distribution.
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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.
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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.
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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).
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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.
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