Browser War: FF3 vs. IE8 vs. G-Chrome!?

[MisterBob]

That's what a regular sandbox does when a sandboxed program wants to write or modify something, but the size of the file that legit plugins have access to are fairly small and can be cloned without issue. The only ones that would cause problems are certain plugins that you intend to have access to your computer as a whole, like the kaspersky scanner, etc. although even that doesn't write, only reads.

If I can take IE and run it through Sandboxie, what's preventing Chrome (which they're writing from scratch) from doing it for a tab containing a plugin?

Sandboxie is far from a lightweight, fast, efficient solution. That software copies tons of local information into the sandbox, essentially cloning the necessary aspects of the machine. An excellent solution for users who want to sandbox entire things, but not good at all for something that needs to sandbox on the fly (say, a web browser).

[Correction]

This right here (including the articles) are enough to make me and I hope anyone, computer savvy (which I am) or not, to not go near Chrome and stick to your FF or IE or whatever until they at least patch it. I wouldn't want to have this shit on my computer if I played FFXI on my PC (which I don't, thank God) with all of these supposed hacking applications infiltrating players through frequented sites.

I don't want to have to wipe my computer again thanks to some crappy trojan, basically. ^^; Firefox onry

This vulnerability requires that the user fall for a 'click here for candy!' type of attack, which 'computer savvy' people would not. The writing of an executable to the desktop is a threat but again, the user would have to either fall for the 'free candy' button or the 'free candy' executable on their desktop.

So I'd still recommend this browser to computer savvy people, just not those new to the internet like my parents. To whom I still give tips on FireFox 2.0.

[Zosi]

That Cnet post is full of shit. Flash on IE and Flash on Firefox use substantially the same plugin, there's just different wrappers to conform to the respective plugin APIs. If you think an API translation is the difference between 95% CPU and "single digits", you don't deserve to be writing columns for Cnet. There's something very odd going on on his three year old laptop.

Of course, the whole thing is ridiculous, because the Flash plugin is a binary blob, and browser developers have about as much control over its performance as... uh... well, as not having any control at all. They give it a device context to paint to, and that's about it.