Do you run Firefox inside a jail ?

[BaronBS]

What's the advantage of running firefox in a jail ?

A setup similar to the OpenBSD unveil system maybe?

 

[gnath]

What's the advantage of running firefox in a jail ?

Low if you have vulnerable OS/pkg's are in use. That is why servers don't have browsers. How much useful are general users to the interested parties. Probably only my identity and banking activities are at stake.

 

[kpedersen]

What's the advantage of running firefox in a jail ?

There are a few.

• You can contain the cancerous spread of dependencies and general cruft that Firefox spams all over your system.
• When firefox gets compromised, nothing can access your useful / private data.
• When you want to clean up firefox and / or remain on the update treadmill, you can just blow away the entire userland and fetch a whole new version and dependencies, ensuring there will be no conflicting cruft remaining.

In fairness, a plain chroot is also pretty close.

If a (typically GUI) application has more than half a dozen or so dependencies, I tend to stick it in a chroot/jail just for good housekeeping. Its a bit like flatpak but not crap.

 

[Alain De Vos]

I would like to disagree.
* You can contain the cancerous spread of dependencies and general cruft that Firefox spams all over your system.
-> The dependencies of firefox move from the host to the jail . The dependencies remain.

FreshPorts -- www/firefox-esr: Web browser based on the browser portion of Mozilla

Mozilla Firefox is a free and open source web browser descended from the Mozilla Application Suite. It is small, fast and easy to use, and offers many advanced features: o Popup Blocking o Tabbed Browsing o Live Bookmarks (ie. RSS) o Extensions o Themes o FastFind o Improved Security

www.freshports.org

* When you want to clean up firefox and / or remain on the update treadmill, you can just blow away the entire userland and fetch a whole new version and dependencies, ensuring there will be no conflicting cruft remaining.
-> If i want to clean my host from firefox i only need to do.

rm -fR /home/mysuser/.cache /home/myuser/.mozilla

 

[astyle]

What's the advantage of running firefox in a jail ?

You can also limit how much RAM firefox can hog, supposedly. rctl(8) works on jails and specific-number processes. I'm in the middle of reading a klarasystems article about that. Basic idea, if you apply rctl(8) to the jail that has firefox in it, this just might work. But like I said, I'm in the middle of exploring that.

 

[kpedersen]

I would like to disagree.
* You can contain the cancerous spread of dependencies and general cruft that Firefox spams all over your system.
-> The dependencies of firefox move from the host to the jail . The dependencies remain.

Yes, but they haven't metastasized into your main host system.

rm -fR /home/mysuser/.cache /home/myuser/.mozilla

You need to do more than that to kill all the malignant cells.