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Mozilla Will Ship Its First Rust Component In Firefox 48 (softpedia.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Softpedia: Mozilla announced today plans to ship its first ever Rust code with the production releases of Firefox. The first ever Rust components will arrive in Firefox 48, scheduled for release on August 2, 2016. After teasing Rust features last year, the Mozilla Foundation announced today that Firefox 48 would contain a new media stack component that's entirely coded in Rust. The first Firefox component to feature Rust code was not chosen at random because media components often execute malicious code when parsing multimedia files. "This makes a memory-safe programming language like Rust a compelling addition to Mozilla's tool-chest for protecting against potentially malicious media content on the Web," says Dave Herman, Director of Strategy at Mozilla Research. During tests of this Rust-based media component in Firefox's unstable builds, Mozilla says that after one billion uses they have yet to see a crash or issue in the Rust media component. Last month, Mozilla released the first versions of Servo, a minimal browser created in Rust code alone. At around the same time, Microsoft open-sourced Checked C, an extension to the C programming language that brings new features to address a series of security-related issues.
Rust does not derive its safety from a runtime sandbox, but from static guarantees enforced by its type system. This prevents memory errors that often lead to arbitrary code execution vulnerabilities, but it does not attempt to enforce higher-level semantic security properties, e.g. if you blindly use an untrusted string as a filename, you can still be tricked into opening /etc/passwd. Rust does not inherently protect you there, nor is it advertised as doing such.
Rust isn't run in a sandbox. It's like C++. It simply has some assurances that the code it compiles should be free of some classical problems that plague software development in systems languages, without it also sacrificing the close-to-bare-metal aspects of languages like C++, and with much more of the costs involved being pushed to the compilation phase than the runtime phase. That's much more than the likes of Java have tried to offer, and it's also why so many people love to bash on it: it's hard to buy into the assurances without enough time passing, and it's made by a relatively small company that's popular to bash on right now.
Pale Moon is only worth it if you want to keep using obsolete tech. It's otherwise no better than Firefox, and has not improved significantly since its inception. It has already broken compatibility with more addons than Firefox did. It will either break compatibility with the obsolete tech you list in your post, or it will continue its slow downward spiral into irrelevance. It simply doesn't have the development community to be its own browser, and once Mozilla (rightly) stops supporting those outdated legacy things, you'll be SOL. Unless of course Pale Moon's community starts to actually pitch in beyond silly PR campaigns that overrate Pale Moon and poo-poo Firefox for "leaving them behind".
That does not mean the Rust solution will be perfect, and it *definitely* doesn't mean you should download and run untrusted Rust apps!
Yes. Rust isn't a sandbox, it's a programming language with memory safety built into the type system. A rust program can do whatever it wants to your system if you don't sandbox it yourself. On the other hand, whole nasty classes of bugs related to buffer overflows, stack smashing and data races cannot happen, which makes it harder to attack from the outside than C.
It says nothing about whether you should trust a particular rust program to not be malicious.
SJW n. One who posts facts.