Convergence – Of the Broswer and OS – Trust

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Convergence – Of the Broswer and OS – Trust

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Convergence

Convergence of the browser and operating system

On Github nickdesaulniers / Convergence

Convergence

Of the Broswer and OS

Nick Desaulniers

Nick Desaulniers

Open Source Zealot at Mozilla

  • Organized NSA Protest in San Francisco.
  • Spoke on NPR about how Software Patents are Evil.

Have you ever looked at your desktop and thought all of this can be done in JavaScript?

Is the browser the first application you find yourself launching on boot?

Trust

Reliance on another person or entity.

Can I trust an executable that I've downloaded from the Internet?

Can I trust that this game is not mining bitcoins without my consent ? (Denial of Service)

Can I trust that I'm downloading what you say I'm downloading?

If your software depends on bundling for distribution, then it is not legitimate software.

Can I trust that this executable is not escalating its privileges, and forging packets to NTP servers?

Process Isolation

Key design goal of Chrome.

Coming to Firefox Nightly. Try it out File > New e10s Window or set the browser.tabs.remote preference to true in about:config.

Trust needs to be revocable when broken.

Consent

Agreement or permission to do or allow something.

Ideally, we want informed consent.

End User License Agreements, Terms and Conditions, and Privacy Policies mean well, but ultimately are failures.

What kind of nefarious things does the OS let my applications do? With great power comes great responsibility.

We should be empowering users to provide informed consent.

Should we allow any application permission to touch the filesystem?

Should we allow any application to establish connections to hosts other than the one I navigated to?

Unixes implement user based permissions.

HTML5 implements application based permissions.

Hierarchical Protection Rings (today)

Hierarchical Protection Rings (tomorrow)

This is a Call

What we're looking for are API's that empower us as developers, but protect users from malice.

Performace

The capabilities of a machine, vehicle, or product, especially when observed under particular conditions.

Wont this additional layer of abstraction affect performance?

Why do we have virtual memory?

Why do we have CPU modes?

Why do we have pointers?

There will always be tradeoffs between additional layers of abstraction and performace.

As computing power increases, the disadvantages of additional abstraction decrease.

Competition is Healthy

JavaScript engines have gotten over 100x times faster since 2006.

Are we fast yet?

My existing C/C++ codebase is pretty fast, can I run that in the browser?

NaCl

Native Client programs cannot directly invoke the native operating system, but must use only interfaces that encapsulate system services securely and portably.

Very low overhead: 5-10% slowdown.

NaCl

While the operating-system neutrality of Native Client tends to encourage good practices with respect to ISA portability, the burden of building, testing and deploying a program on all supported hardware platforms---currently IA-32, ARM and x86-64---lies with the developer. This arrangement makes it too easy for the developer to fail to support one or more ISAs, and tends to create a barrier for future new ISAs, threatening the portability promise of the Web.

PNaCl

Compile to a subset of LLVM IR which is translated on the client to a NaCl executable.

LLVM IR is a compiler IR [not a VM]

Easy to support if you ship an existing browser engine with Pepper API support, otherwise it requires duplication of lots of undocumented Chrome behavior.

Indeed JavaScript is a weird language, but most other languages can be compiled to it.

Swap out LLVM's codegen with our JS codegen!

asm.js

Banana Bread Triple Demo Unreal Engine 3

Without OS support for allocating exectuable memory, it's not possible to have a competive JavaScript engine (no JIT).

asm.js

Works in all browsers. A subset of JavaScript is still just JavaScript. Things that work everywhere are great!

Standards

A level of quality or attainment.

System Applications Working Group

Most APIs are in the Stable draft (Last Call) of W3C standardization process.

  • Browser API

  • Bluetooth API

  • Calendar API

  • Network Interface API

  • Media Storage API

  • Secure Elements API

  • Device Capabilities API

  • System Settings API

  • Idle API

  • Execution Model

  • Security Model

  • Alarm API

  • Contacts API

  • Messaging API

  • Telephony API

  • Raw Sockets API

  • Bluetooth API

Developer Tools

The next forefront of competition between browser vendors.

WebApp Runtime

Success

Achievement of intention: the achievement of something planned or attempted.
Chromebooks Made Up 20% of US Laptop Sales in 2013, Says NPD
Around 390,000 Firefox OS phones shipped last year, according to IDC, a figure it expects to rise to 2.5 million this year.

We haven't won yet, but we're showing viability for a novel concept.

Call to Action

What would a computing environment encapsulated within a browser look like?

Thanks

Nick Desaulniers

@LostOracle on Twitter

\n on irc.mozilla.org

nickdesaulniers on GitHub

nickdesaulniers.github.io -> blog