How far behind is each major Chromium browser?

115

sskaul about 3 hours ago 42 commentsRead Article on chromium-drift.pages.dev

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Discussion (42 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

butz•about 3 hours ago

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.

waitwhatwhoa•about 1 hour ago

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

captn3m0•about 2 hours ago

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.

nicoburns•about 2 hours ago

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.

nolist_policy•23 minutes ago

Yep. JavaScript VM breakout, Sandbox breakout and spectre/meltdown side channel leaks are all tracked as vulnerabilities towards Electron while ordinary apps don't even have such security features.

josefx•about 2 hours ago

Didn't some get exploited early on because electron made it trivial to load third party websites without any kind of XSS protection?

panzi•about 2 hours ago

Just wanted to write the same comment!

quantumleaper•about 3 hours ago

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...

dopa42365•about 2 hours ago

More like 4 weeks than 2.

https://chromestatus.com/roadmap

quantumleaper•33 minutes ago

You are right, I misremembered this announcement [1]. They are switching from a 4-week to a 2-week release schedule this September.

[1] https://developer.chrome.com/blog/chrome-two-week-release

dataflow•about 2 hours ago

> 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?

xeeeeeeeeeeenu•about 2 hours ago

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.

superjan•about 1 hour ago

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.

pimlottc•about 2 hours ago

Please don’t use green/red schemes, it’s the most common form of colorblindness and it’s especially bad with such pale shades.

sgtlaggy•29 minutes ago

On the topic of accessibility, the contrast of the text in the "up to date" bubbles is very low. I can barely see the yellow one, let alone read it without significant eye strain.

Firefox's dev tools have an Accessibility tab where you can see warnings about low contrast and simulate different forms of color blindness.

richwater•20 minutes ago

This website, while cool data, is just awful for me who is very red/green colorblind. Unusable.

xandrius•about 1 hour ago

It has text supporting the color, so it's fine.

richwater•20 minutes ago

Some of the text is undereadable on the background.

shooly•about 1 hour ago

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?

magpi3•about 1 hour ago

White with black text for success and black with white text for failure. People would figure it out.

shooly•about 1 hour ago

So as I said instead of confusing a minority of people, we confuse everyone instead?

yawndex•about 1 hour ago

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...

UberFly•about 2 hours 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.

darkwater•35 minutes ago

I use Firefox, btw

Retr0id•about 1 hour ago

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)

mm263•about 3 hours ago

Please add Helium

wswin•about 2 hours ago

and Ungoogled Chromium

dotcoma•about 1 hour ago

Helium rocks!

ece•about 1 hour ago

qutebrowser would be nice too.

Yehoshaphat•about 2 hours ago

I second this motion.

mostlyk•about 1 hour ago

I third this motion.

shevy-java•30 minutes ago

The problem is: we all are behind Google. Google sits in the driver seat here.

This is really, really bad ...

Edit: Ok, almost all of us. There are some non-Google browsers such as firefox, but Google dished out money to Mozilla for many years, which made real competition impossible.

jjmarr•about 3 hours ago

Shouldn't it also show the version number of the browser the user is currently on?

koolala•about 2 hours ago

Which user?

catlikesshrimp•about 2 hours ago

The one visiting the website (tfa website)

koolala•about 1 hour ago

Why? What does tfa mean? I'm visiting it on Firefox.

koolala•about 2 hours ago

Could add the Meta Quest browser

ece•about 1 hour ago

Vivaldi does minor releases as needed for security and bugs, so saying 1 major version behind is a bit coarse.

Fokamul•about 2 hours ago

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.

shooly•about 1 hour ago

What fingerprinting? What does this have to do with anything?