[pjc50]

Users fall into two categories:

1) Don't really care about privacy. Might not want their chat on the front page of the papers, but aren't going to go to great lengths to achieve that.

2) Actually care about privacy and are informed. There's not many of these people, but they're trained to be wary of every outside dependency and opportunity for hostile code injection. Crypto running in the browser can be replaced any time you load it if the host is compromised - either in the technical sense or the legal sense. Yes, it could be hashed, but it isn't and there's no mechanism for this nor plans to build one.

Not to mention that the browser itself presents a pretty large attack surface.

[new299]

> Yes, it could be hashed, but it isn't and there's no mechanism for this nor plans to build one.

That's kind of a shame. It would be nice if apps distributed over the web could be signed the same way they are from repositories.

> Not to mention that the browser itself presents a pretty large attack surface.

As does the operating system itself. I would have thought with a local (likely native) client, you just have one less layer to get through.

[lukeschlather]

> That's kind of a shame. It would be nice if apps distributed over the web could be signed the same way they are from repositories.

This sounds like a theoretical impossibility. The server's source code is by nature closed, and while the server could provide you a copy of the source with a signature, there's really no way for you to verify that the code you've been promised is the code that is running.

[new299]

A browser feature would be required that could calculate/display the hash of the delivered code and optionally verify it against a 3rd party server. Ideally you'd want have particular versions signed as "audited" etc.

I don't see how it's a theoretical impossibility.

[lukeschlather]

You're neglecting the server-side code. If you have access to the full source code to verify it, you're not describing a web service, you're describing a local application that happens to be implemented in a browser.

You already can distribute signed browser add-ons.