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by vbezhenar 2769 days ago
If you can attack TLS, game is over, you can't trust anything. A huge majority of Firefox users use built-in update mechanisms. Making life harder for majority of users to improve security of the selected few is a questionable decision. And if you're really insisting, you can always install some addon which will calculate hashsum of JavaScript resources.
1 comments

> Making life harder for majority of users to improve security of the selected few is a questionable decision

I agree in theory, though as an aside this isn't true for distribution packages because usually they are GPG signed with keys that are in TPMs on the release machines. Of course any other internet communication relies on TLS not being broken.

But another attack would be modifying one of Firefox's mirrors to host malicious Firefox (not a TLS attack but an attack of a specific mirror). GPG detached signatures for distribution packages protect against this and many other such problems (obviously some attacks against the build servers of a distribution would be problematic, but the same applies for any software project).

Though to be fair, I don't know if Firefox's auto-updater uses an update system like TUF or a distribution-style update system (which is mostly equivalent in terms of security) which would protect against these sorts of problems.

> Making life harder for majority of users to improve security of the selected few is a questionable decision.

I don't understand how logins being built-in to the browser is making life harder for the majority of users. It wouldn't make a difference to them. It would make a difference to the development team, but one could easily argue that the development team should be willing to make life slightly harder for themselves in order to make Firefox users more secure.