Chrome being worse than Firefox doesn’t make Firefox’s default telemetry, adware, and DoH to cloudflare good. When the bar is Chrome, essentially any browser passes.
Telemetry you can’t easily disable (requires modifying about:config, can change on update), Glean (nastier than anything in chrome), DoH to cloudflare, pocket (adware), Anonym.
In defense of this warning, when I first put my application on Flathub, I had it because of how file i/o worked (didn’t support XDG portals, so needed home folder access to save properly). It did actually motivate me to get things working with portals to not request the extra permissions and get the green “safe” marker.
A lot of apps will always be “unsafe” because they do things that requires hardware access, though, so I could see them wanting something more nuanced.
If you use Debian-based linux (Ubuntu, Minut, others), Mozilla recommends getting the package directly from their respository rather than flatpak or other repos.
Personally, I saw a major performance increase on my low-powered laptop when I switched from flatpak to the Mozilla package.
pretty standard compared to OSs like Android and iOS. i think the mobile OSs, at least recently, have done better at this; they don’t ask for permission until they need it. want to import bookmarks? i need file system access for that. want to open your webcam? i need device access. doing it all upfront leads to all the problems mentioned in this thread: unclear as to why, easy to forget what access you’ve given, no ability to deny a subset of options, etc.
Just reminding folks that just because it’s flatpak’d, doesn’t mean it’s sandboxed. But they probably should add some general click here for more info.
I’m a firm believer that regardless of operating system that a warning message saying that installing something could cause harm to your device definitely makes people think twice about installation if they’re not tech savvy (AKA know more than the bare minimum anymore). It’s definitely intentional that the large companies responsible scare you away from doing the things you want because they want you locked into doing things the way they want.
To be fair, the fact that browsers are allowed to do so much that this warning has to be shown is more an indictment on the current state of browsers (which at this point are almost like installing VMWare and a virtual machine on your computer!) than on something something Firefox or something something Flatpak.
I mean yes, how exactly would you want the web to work? In order for it to be secure we need website code to run in an isolated environment. Modern web browsers have gotten pretty good at this.
Though we say it’s a JavaScript Virtual Machine it’s not the kind of virtual machine you are thinking of. It just means it’s being interpreted in a certain environment rather than compiles code running natively. It’s not like a whole OS. Running a web browser in a Virtual Machine is unironically a method to improve security; checkout Qubes OS for an example.
Also the permissions it’s asking for aren’t that serious. Basically GPU access and download folder access.
I mean yes, how exactly would you want the web to work?
Text and images and hyperlinks; maybe audio and video if you’re lucky and you can prove you can be trusted. No such thing as scripting, or if it’s allowed, only in a limited manner with no such thing as “eval” and obfuscation and no ability to add or delete nodes from the DOM (or if it’s allowed, those nodes must reflect under View Source / CTRL+U). No such things as loading a javascript audioplayer that tries to mix 123456 weird sources, just link me the .m3u direct to the audio stream’s .mp3 file, or even better an .opus.
Definitively no DRM.
If any such thing as GPU access is provided it should be to deposit data, not to run code.
Text and images and hyperlinks; maybe audio and video if you’re lucky and you can prove you can be trusted.
Those things still require a GPU to render efficiently.
All the other stuff you talk about don’t need a GPU or really any systems permissions at all. So even if the web changes to your twisted view the flatpak would still require the same permissions. All you’ve just proven is that you don’t understand technology.
If any such thing as GPU access is provided it should be to deposit data, not to run code.
You don’t know what a GPU is apparently. Regardless the same access is needed for both.
Also you use Lemmy, which requires scripting. Pretty much every online game, shopping website, calculator, and so on require scripting of some kind. Scripting isn’t just for bad things like tracking. It makes a lot of cool stuff possible, that you doubtlessly use everyday. As a plus it’s generally more secure to use a web app than have a myriad of different programs or applets replace all these different things, as websites are sandboxed. There is a reason JavaScript replaced Flash and Java applets.
You’re confusing a technology problem with a society/capitalism problem.
They should not be worried, they should be educated.
If you worry a new user enough they’ll go back to Windows or Apple because there’s less scary warnings there.
We need to make the transition as pain free as possible. Learning about the joys of kernel compilation and SELinux can come later.
The first step is "Hey, this is as usable as Windows, without stupid ads in the start menu.
No. If you put a warning on every app (except for the most trivial ones that don’t actually do anything useful) then the warnings mean nothing. The become something more than ass-covering legal(ish) BS.
What do you mean by “improving”? This alarming warning appears because Firefox requires permissions. Let us look at the permissions listed there:
“User device access”. From the docs, I’d say the browser needs it for rendering?
“Download folder read/write access”. This one is obvious - the files you download with your browser go there.
“Can access some specific files”. This one, I’ll admit, is a bit cryptic - what files does it need to access? But this one is on Flatpak for making the permission so general.
App permissions should not be about “this app cannot be trusted because it asks for scary scary permissions”. They should be about “take a look at the list of permissions the app requests and determine whether or not it make sense for such an app to need such permissions”.
To 1.: dri instead of all would handle hardware-accelerated rendering. Then some webcams or controllers won’t be accessible though. This one’s a bit complicated, since the necessary portals for e.g. generic USB device access aren’t yet there.
To 2.: portals should be used instead of that. Using them doesn’t require these permissions.
To 3.: click on details and see. This is Flathub making it easy to understand for users.
Permissions should make clear whatever dangerous things an app can do. If not, why do all this effort of isolation? Firefox could delete everything in downloads, either by accident on Mozilla’s side, or a privilege escalation. If the app used portals instead, it couldn’t, at least without user interaction. Or a browser security vulnerability could open up any USB devices to webpages. It’s all about what could happen with granted permissions. And these can 100 % be fixed in at least some way.
If “nearly every app” that people already use suddenly has a big warning on it, people will quickly decide the warnings are meaningless and start ignoring them, like Prop 65 warnings. Congratulations, we’ve moved the needle backwards.
You have to meet people where they’re at. I finally switched to Linux when MS introduced a feature I wanted no part in (Recall AI), but I would have given up within a day or two if the transition hadn’t been basically seamless. I was able to pick up right where I left off, using all the same apps I did on Windows except MusicBee RIP, but now I’m in a better position than before, on an open-source OS instead of closed-source. Now there’s a little less friction between me and better, freer software.
I think it’s absurd that most distros have no tools whatsoever for doing regular checksums of their own files. Windows certainly got that part right IMO.
I’m double checking this myself now, but there are plenty of tools (debsum) they’re just not part of the default implementation as of last time I looked.
i’m almost 100% that debsums on apt stuff and the --verify flag in rpm distros do what sfc did. (kinda, debsums and --verify check against a list of checksums from the repo, i’m pretty sure sfc cracks open an actual known version of the files and compares em with whats on disk)
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