[dijit]

it shouldn’t be an option.

Some IT departments just see a “more secure” checkbox and will always check it, even if it doesn’t make sense holistically- sometimes compliance incentivises (or forces) this behaviour.

A common example is forcing intune/device enrolment for mobile devices (including ipads)- but not for the infinitely less secure laptops: because no such endpoint enforcement checkbox exists

[ArnoVW]

While this is true, allow me to give another POV. I run corporate security and internal IT for a 100 person SaaS. I "nudge" our users towards Chrome. Why? Because I can manage Chrome using the config infrastructure provided by Google. Because Google has more resources to secure their browser. Because my observability and DLP stuff works with Chrome and not with Firefox. And I'm probably still missing out on a bunch of things.

Those are real, practical reasons. Not just "if I do this I get to check another box".

Yes. I know. It's a pain that when you cannot do what you want to do. But it's not your laptop. It's the company's. Supporting more browsers to the same standard that I just described would take engineering resources, of which I do not have an infinite supply. And the priority goes to keeping the company secure.

[lol768]

> Because Google has more resources to secure their browser

They've kneecapped ad-blockers, when ad networks are perhaps one of the biggest causes of malware installs/page hijacking/other unwanted behaviour. I'm not sure how you can consider Chrome remotely secure in this light.

[verall]

[delayed]

[chinathrow]

If you run a SaaS, large parts of your orgs should be on all major browsers regularly.

[ArnoVW]

I have a handful of endpoints, used by staff that represent a low level of risk, that use Firefox for that precise reason.

But really, we have a couple of million enterprise end-users, some of which surely using Edge. If we as much as move a button without telling them about it three months in advance, it's the end of the world. In 10 years time, no customer has raised it.

[dijit]

while valid points, my company uses Microsoft products and they are pretty abysmal in whatever domain they have products in. Edge for example being one of the weaker browser options. (though better than it was in the IE era).

Being forced to use various tools for compliance is frustrating, doubly so if it helps create a stronger monopoly position, because a monopoly position creates stagnation, which makes worse products.

But those worse products are forced on users, even when better ones start to come about.

This is the crux of my issue, Microsoft is the king of this behaviour, and they are using this a lot which is squeezing the metaphorical testicles of almost all companies in Europe.

[ktm5j]

It's their organization. They are allowed to make decisions about what software their employees use. I'm a die-hard Mozilla fan, but I don't find this unreasonable.

[cmeacham98]

The problem is Google appears to label this as a security feature. I'm fine with the feature existing, but it should say something like "require Chrome" or "block Firefox" not "require a secure browser (wink wink we actually mean Chrome)"

[insanitybit]

The wording here is bad, but basically CAA supports non browser specific policy and, in some cases, browser specific policy (GSuite offers a "Managed Chrome" policy). Firefox users can leverage much of the non browser specific policy, they obviously can not be a part of the "Managed Chrome" offering.

[saghm]

There's no contradiction here; it's totally possible for a company to make a feature configurable so that it doesn't block their competitors but also intentionally design and market it in a way that's misleading in ways that will lead to their competitors getting blocked. When we're talking about a company as large as Google and a product with as much market share as Chrome, I don't think it's that crazy to think that things like this add up to encouraging even more hegemony, and when that happens to align perfectly with the incentives of the company making said product decisions, I also don't think it's crazy to think it's unlikely to be a coincidence.

[insanitybit]

If the argument is that Google has built a product that encourages use of Google products, of course. The question is whether that's some sort of trickery or odd or bad. "Google offers Managed Chrome as a service" hardly seems controversial to me.

[jchw]

Google offering managed chrome as a service is a completely sensible thing. The problem is that they are nearly a browser monopoly, and making Google Workspace work in such a way with Google Chrome feels to me like anti-competitive practices. If we didn't have one giant megacorp that did both things, it would be different.

Of course, so far the only workable model for web browsers is having a giant megacorp fund their development and maintenance. Which is a huge issue, and we will do basically nothing about it.

(Don't get me wrong. I have high hopes for Ladybird and even Servo, but they may come too late if effectively-proprietary features force most users to stick to Chrome anyways.)

[jm4]

It is a security feature. In a corporate environment, you generally don't want users installing their own software. If it's a remote access thing from a personal device, you still generally want to be able to establish some kind of baseline. I don't like Chrome - not even a little bit - but I will admit that they have a pretty damn good security track record. I'd rather my remote users be on there than some crusty Firefox installation with 40 extensions. Organizations have the right to make these decisions when they are the ones that own the data. For example, when I was still in that world, we required personal phones to be encrypted to access corporate email. This was when a lot of people would still walk around with devices without a pin. People complained, but it was non-negotiable.

[hnlmorg]

Literally the only reason they can argue Chrome is more secure than Firefox in that kind of setting is because they can Google can push Google Chrome profiles via Google Workspaces but they’ve never working with Mozilla to create an interop for Firefox.

When Microsoft did this with Windows, AD, and Internet Explore, it was deemed a breach of anti-trust laws. The question is whether such laws apply to Google given they don’t have a monopoly in the identity services domain.

If you’d asked me 5 years ago, I’d have said “no way”, but recent judgements with Apple and their App Store lead me to think there is still hope. Regardless of how remote that might be.

[jchw]

Note that making lock-in features like this effectively proprietary to the Chrome browser is only possible because of the fact that it's the same company making Google Workspace and Google Chrome.

I absolutely see many problems with this and you really ought to as well.

[charcircuit]

>only possible

Two different companies can partner together and release features in both of the company's interests.

[dijit]

Google and Microsoft shouldn’t be giving levers that bake you more into their ecosystem regardless.

Your corporate serfdom is not in question, but I disagree with that notion too.

[ktm5j]

It's a paid product, they are actually allowed to do this. Google is obviously going to focus on security testing with their own browser. It's understandable that organizations want to require chrome for their employees to access their workspace in the interest of security, but it's not the default.

There is zero problem here guys.

[saghm]

> It's understandable that organizations want to require chrome for their employees to access their workspace in the interest of security, but it's not the default.

Can you elaborate on why you think that Firefox is inherently insecure in some way for accessing Google workspaces?

> It's a paid product, they are actually allowed to do this.

If that were the only metric, then no monopoly would ever be broken up for any reason (which I guess is the way regulation seems to work nowadays, but at least in theory it's supposed to be possible for it to happen sometimes). The idea that using market pressure from one product a company sells to squeeze out competition in another is totally fine as long as the first product is paid is not a premise I agree with.

[rabeener]

I don’t think anyone is saying Firefox is inherently bad. What I’m reading, and what I believe, is Google just has a better product for secure enterprise browsing because of the controls they offer

The browser is where basically all your work happens, especially as a Workspace customer—think about how much of your work is done in the browser. That makes it a huge, attractive attack surface. And attackers don't even need a browser vulnerability; they can just convince an employee to install a malicious browser extension, and suddenly they can steal passwords, watch everything you do, and hijack your sessions on other sites.

So security teams need visibility into what's happening in the browser. Google does a decent—not great—job of providing this through Managed Chrome: centralized logs, control over which extensions can be installed, even alerts when someone reuses their Workspace password elsewhere.

Firefox, Safari, and most others don't offer these business controls, which means a security team allowing them is flying blind. And a blind security team is gonna have a bad time… mmmkay.

On support: someone mentioned using Firefox to verify their app works across browsers—god's work, truly. But not every vendor does that, so IT ends up fielding "this site just isn't working" tickets that turn out to be browser compatibility issues. Fewer supported browsers means a smaller surface to support and a better experience all around.

This can't be enforced where you're not using your corporate identity. A Dropbox account on your personal email is still accessible from any browser.

[vel0city]

> Can you elaborate on why you think that Firefox is inherently insecure in some way for accessing Google workspaces?

Allowing users running who knows what version of Firefox (or any "non-validated"/unmanaged browser, not necessarily just Firefox) browser running who knows what extensions can be pretty unsafe. There are lots of malicious extensions out there that are stupid simple to install.

In the Workspace world, Chrome can be configured and enforced to have certain kinds of settings applied. Only allowing certain extensions. Ensure certain version ranges. That sort of thing.

[lern_too_spel]

If a corporation with my data allowed access to its internal tools using any browser running any arbitrary and possibly compromised third party extensions, that's a data leak and class action lawsuit waiting to happen.

[wslh]

I would say it's common to find dark patterns that involves ambiguity like the discussion we are having here. We can't know for sure but Google can increase the probability of being on their ecosystem.

[insanitybit]

CAA is one of the most powerful security features you can enable in an org. You can manage browser extensions, device password policy, encryption, configuration, cookie attestation, etc.

[tux3]

CAA is completely based on trust, it's not one of the most powerful security feature. It's completely voluntary reporting by the browser, and any attacker who cares can just lie without issues.

You can make Firefox pass CAA if you want. You take the Chrome "SecureConnect Reporting" (Context-Aware Access) plugin, port it to Firefox with some light changes, and you can report whatever you want to CAA.

[insanitybit]

That's not entirely true. For example, on ChromeOS CAA is hardware backed. But obviously CAA is not intended to be our entire MDM solution, an attacker in a position to spoof your entire browser can bypass some of the policies on some operating systems. Similarly, attackers in that same position can bypass TLS. An attacker who owns the kernel can bypass much of your MDM. An attacker who owns the hardware can bypass just about anything.

[tux3]

I haven't dug into the native helper to see how much it checks, I can believe that ChromeOS does full remote attestation. If it's anything like Android Play Integrity, there's not a lot of flexibility without hardware exploits.

But who outside of Google is running exclusively ChromeOS? My impression from looking at the JS part is that it's mostly obfuscation, with the possible exception of ChromeOS.

I feel like the secure connect client being closed source would have been an effective deterrent 5 years ago, but these days everyone's throwing LLMs at everything. So an attack that would have taken effort doesn't present nearly as much of a barrier anymore. At least as long as there remain some platforms that don't enforce full attestation...

[insanitybit]

My point was that CAA's threat model is flexible based on your requirements. If your requirement is "an attacker with the ability to make arbitrary network requests from the host can not pretend to be Chrome", CAA does not work unless you have OS/Hardware support (which ChromeOS provides).

I just don't think that matters much. CAA is policy enforcement, it is not a full MDM solution, nor is it antimalware.

[saghm]

> But who outside of Google is running exclusively ChromeOS?

I think Chromebooks are pretty common in school settings

[tadfisher]

Understand that, in this conversation, your use of "attacker" is referring to "end user of the hardware". Which might be part of the Chrome team's definition, or might not, but gosh it would be nice to cater to the folks who are using the dang computer.

[insanitybit]

We're talking about a device managed by a corporation. I have no idea what your point is.

[Doohickey-d]

Well, it could als also be argued that Chrome _is_ more secure, for example because it uses app-bound encryption using Windows DPAPI system, for cookies, so that it at least tries to protect cookies from malicious applications running on the device. Firefox does not do this: https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/279629/are-cook...

If course the reverse can also be argued, for example that Firefox supports proper adblocking.

[AlexandrB]

Unfortunately the malicious actor I want to protect my cookies from is Google.

[zchrykng]

Not really a serious argument when you are accessing a Google product. Sure, don't want to interact with Google? Don't interact with Google, but logging into Google workspaces with Firefox definitely isn't protecting your data from Google.

[farbklang]

Well - it does make sense. If an organisation that contracts me has to chose between a) BYOD - but restrict downloads, etc, enforce export control, directly in the browser - I happily take that, vs getting a Windows laptop that is locked down and forced to work with that.

[SoftTalker]

Using a maintained and up-to-date browser is a reasonable requirement for an IT department (should be for anyone really). Would you suggest they should be allowing IE6 just because a user might prefer it?

Of course Google is going to suggest using Chrome, if they detect that the browser might be out of date.

[dijit]

Is the implication that Firefox is not maintained or?

The issue presented doesn’t seem to be “an up to date browser check” it seems to be a “is it latest chrome” check, which is a very different thing.

[SoftTalker]

We don't know. The author doesn't mention how current the Firefox browser is/was.

If the organization is indeed enabling a specific check for Chrome that seems a little over the top but they're the ones supporting their users and if they want to make their life easier by only dealing with one browser that's their decision to make. It's like saying that everyone has to use Windows, or a specific line of laptops, or any other standardization to simplify the support workload.

[rpdillon]

> This was for a Google Workspace Business Plus account and workspace, from an up to date browser and OS.

[kolinko]

Not a little over the top, it is anticompetitive behavior.

[michaelmrose]

It's not a little over the top its an antitrust issue and clearly and obviously wrong.

[SpicyLemonZest]

It's not clear to me that Context-Aware Access is as configurable as you're implying. At a glance, the docs seem to suggest that Chrome is the only browser you can force standardization on, which IMO does push this towards being Google's fault.

[insanitybit]

That's correct, there is no way to say "only allow Firefox" in CAA because the attestations are either browser agnostic or chrome specific (as part of the managed Chrome offering that GSuite supports).

[ibejoeb]

No, not at all. The implication is that the organization is dictating the software that employees are to use. There's nothing unusual about this.

[jstummbillig]

If we are meant to believe that this is a Chrome-invasion-move, it's the least effective lever of all times. Most of the time the more plausible explanations are just the likely ones.

[dijit]

you’d probably say something different if it were microsoft.

I don’t see why I should give affordances of good will to Google here.

They’re not stupid, they know that this is an effective lever to further cement full-fat chrome as the default browser for the internet.

[SoftTalker]

Chrome was created because Google felt that the IE monopoly was hindering the advancement of web standards and improved browser capabilities. I suppose you could argue that was a different Google at a different time, but at one point they did feel that browser diversity was a good thing.

[recursivecaveat]

I mean, they claimed to be for browser diversity when it was not them on top lol. Underdogs want the race to tighten up, 85% market leaders want to stay out in front.

[subscribed]

Strawman argument. Firefox is maintained and up to date browser.

Why did you even compare it to IE6, out of the curiosity?

[sandeepkd]

Its a normal choice, given a checkbox on page which advertises that checking it would make your security posture more safe. The IT person is safeguarding their own job.

Other way to look at it is, the company is paying for everything, and they get to make decisions based on what suits their security needs.