Website sandboxing for Android

[mozillian]

👋, website sandboxing/containerization for Android still isn't a thing on Firefox as far as i know, though i can see the fission.autostart setting in the beta version I'm honestly unsure if it does anything as I've not fully had the time to take a look into that yet and even if it were to work, i know that the non-beta version of Firefox would already not be able to benefit from it due to the about:config menu being disabled on the browser. I believe that this has been one of the main drawbacks on Firefox that's been driving technically inclined people away from the browser; as even Mozilla has confessed that the addition of the said feature on desktop was a quite tremendous step in the right direction.

[mozillian · Accepted solution]

This will be ironic, but... I've tested the beta version of Firefox on Android and was able to confirm that site sandboxing was actually implemented in the browser but was just not at all mentioned by Mozilla anywhere and pretty much and for some reason made impossible to reach by the non-beta users as it's not possible for them to use about:config to enable the option (fission.autostart) to do so... Even worse, i believe I've stumbled upon the option on mobile a year or so back when i was testing browser candidates in case i randomly started to not like the Brave browser, so it's (if I'm not wrong) pretty much always been there and made impossible for users to enable for quite literally some reason I'm not even able to figure out, trying out the implementation; nothing seemed to have broken and I'm 90% certain that nothing would have on the long run; yet, Mozilla for some unknown reason chose to not include the Android version even having such an ill-arguably important feature in any of their documentation, or any I've been able to see. Now, once again if you weren't able to catch it when you first breezed through the lines; the Android version of the Firefox browser turns out to actually have an implementation of sandboxing for in-site targets and yet thanks to the Mozilla foundation for whatever reason locking it away & not at all even mentioning that it's been there the whole time, most of the  even technically inclined people think that there is no such implementation in the browser, at all. Just Google Android browsers comparison ffs, people are not recommending Firefox for they think that it doesn't at all support Fission from desktop, that's honestly crazy that the foundation has been for no apparent reason at all keeping the said option disabled and quite literally disabling the option entirely for most of the users that might've even turned it on in the first place, i honestly don't currently have time to research how long it's been since the desktop version got the Fission module but i believe that it's more then very late to get it working on Android already, be  it the browser already has it baked in or not, yet, i once again don't know how long the option has been on the mobile platform to even enable Fission in the first place; I'll look into that later, yet, I can't imagine and i hope that it has not been ported to mobile since a very recent time to this date or this i believe surely won't look good on the foundation.

[ntt]

Yes, Fission is needed for Firefox on Android because it's a powerful security feature but it's not yet enabled by default it seems as there's some issues: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1610822

[mozillian]

Indeed, though nobody even talking about this sort of stuff will mean nobody will be providing feedback, be they technically inclined or not; so maybe we won't see Fission for the next 5 years just because there's not enough feedback or data to be fully certain of the possible stuff that may happen and this important security feature has already been in the browser for what, 4 years now? That's quite bad in itself. No rollout = No data = No rollout = Less security

They honestly could at least test it out on nightly and slowly creep it up to beta, not like the nightly folk can say anything against it, they are using the not-stable version already anyway... Also, i still haven't encountered any issues on my beta install.

[sandboxsecurity]

Website sandboxing and containerization are crucial features for enhancing browser security by isolating web content in separate processes, thus reducing the risk of cross-site contamination.

Despite the presence of the fission.autostart setting in Firefox's beta version, its full functionality on the Android platform remains ambiguous, given the limitations of the non-beta versions, especially with the about:config menu being inactive.

This poses a concern for security-conscious users who rely on such features to protect their browsing activities. As noted by Mozilla, implementing such security measures on desktop versions marked a significant advancement, suggesting a potential area for growth on mobile platforms.

To explore more about cyber security, you can visit [sandboxsecurity.ai] for further insights.