TenFourFox FPR15b1 available

TenFourFox Feature Parity Release 15 beta 1 is now available (downloads, hashes, release notes).

In honour of New Coke's temporary return to the market (by the way, I say it tastes like Pepsi and my father says it tastes like RC), I failed again with this release to get some sort of async/await support off the ground, and we are still plagued by issue 533. The second should be possible to fix, but I don't know exactly what's wrong. The first is not possible to fix without major changes because it reaches up into the browser event loop, but should be still able to get parsing and thus enable at least partial functionality from the sites that depend on it. That part didn't work either. A smaller hack, though, did make it into this release with test changes. Its semantics aren't quite right, but they're good enough for what requires it and does fix some parts of Github and other sites.

However, there are some other feature improvements, including expanded blocking of cryptominers when basic adblock is enabled (from the same list Mozilla uses for enhanced privacy in mainstream Firefox), and updated internationalization support with upgraded timezones and locales such as the new Japanese Reiwa era (for fun, look at Is it Reiwa yet? in FPR14.1 before you download FPR15b1). The usual maintenance and security fixes are (will be) also included (in final). In the meantime, I'm going to take a different pass at the async/await problem for FPR16. If even that doesn't work, we'll have to see where we're at then for parity purposes, since while the majority of websites still work well in TenFourFox's heavily patched-up engine there are an increasing number of major ones that don't. It's hard to maintain a browser engine on your own. :(

Meanwhile, if you'd like the next generation of PowerPC but couldn't afford a Talos II, maybe you can afford a Blackbird. Here's what I thought of it. (See also the followup.)

Stand by for FPR14 SPR1 chemspill

Mozilla has shipped a fix for MFSA2019-18 in Firefox 67.0.3 and 60.7.1. This exploit has been detected in the wild, and while my analysis indicates it would require a PowerPC-specific attack to be exploitable in official TenFourFox builds (the Intel versions may be directly exploited, however), it could probably cause drive-by crashes and we should therefore ship an urgent fix as well. The chemspill is currently undergoing confidence tests and I'm shooting to release builds before the weekend. For builders, the only change in FPR14 SPR1 is the patch for bug 1544386, which I will be pushing to the repo just as soon as I have confirmed the fix causes no regressions.

This chemspill also holds up the FPR15 beta which was actually scheduled for today. Unfortunately, the big JavaScript update I've been trying to make for the last couple cycles also ran aground and will not be in FPR15 either. There is a smaller one and some other improvements, so this is not an empty release, but I'll talk more about that in a few days.

Make Cheese Grating Great Again

The Mac Pro, like New Coke, is back. In a miniature cheese grater you could make a mean quesadilla with. A million Power Mac G5s and O.G. Mac Pros are singing out, "we told you so! We told you so!"

But if you're going to buy one of these things (starting at $6000), you don't get to complain how much a Talos II costs.

Finally, a bit of love for Intel Tiger

Again, a polite reminder that Intel Macs aren't supported, but that doesn't mean people don't want to run TenFourFox on them. Thanks to new builder Hayley, Tiger-compatible versions of FPR14 and the MP4 Enabler are available for Intel. Previous versions have had issues on Tiger due to issue 209, so watch for that if you choose to run these, but initial testing at least looks very promising.

I've also given Ken direct access to that folder so that he can coordinate and upload Intel builds on a semi-regular basis without me as the rate limiting step. Remember, the Intel build is unsupported and issues posted to Tenderapp about it will be closed. There are no guarantees that it works, and there are no guarantees that builds will continue.

Meanwhile, I'm working on what may be a fruitless effort to add async/await support and am about halfway done with the merge. It will probably build but no guarantees that it will work, and there's probably some additional fixes needed to get it up to reasonable standards compliance. I'm trying to keep it all in one easily managed commit which is why there hasn't been much activity on Github for FPR15; this may be the only major new feature in order to reduce regression risk. More later.

TenFourFox FPR14 available

TenFourFox Feature Parity Release 14 final is now available for testing (downloads, hashes, release notes). Besides outstanding security updates, this release fixes the current tab with TenFourFox's AppleScript support so that this exceptional script now functions properly as expected:

tell application "TenFourFoxG5"
  tell front browser window
    set URL of current tab to "https://www.google.com/"
    repeat while (current tab is busy)
      delay 1
    end repeat
    tell current tab
      run JavaScript "let f = document.getElementById('tsf');f.q.value='tenfourfox';f.submit();"
    end tell
    repeat while (current tab is busy)
      delay 1
    end repeat
    tell current tab
      run JavaScript "return document.getElementsByTagName('h3')[0].innerText + ' ' + document.getElementsByTagName('cite')[0].innerText"
    end tell
  end tell
end tell

The font blacklist has also been updated and I have also hard-set the frame rate to 30 in the pref even though the frame rate is capped at 30 internally and such a change is simply a placebo. However, there are people claiming this makes a difference, so now you have your placebo pill and I hope you like the taste of it. :P The H.264 wiki page is also available, if you haven't tried MPEG-4/H.264 playback. The browser will finalize Monday evening Pacific as usual.

For FPR15, the JavaScript update that slipped from this milestone is back on. It's hacky and I don't know if it will work; we may be approaching the limits of feature parity, but it should compile, at least. I'm trying to reduce the changes to JavaScript in this release so that regressions are also similarly limited. However, I'm also looking at adding some later optimizations to garbage collection and using Mozilla's own list of malware scripts to additionally seed basic adblock, which I think can be safely done simultaneously.

ZombieLoad doesn't affect Power Macs

The latest in the continued death march of speculative execution attacks is ZombieLoad (see our previous analysis of Spectre and Meltdown on Power Macs). ZombieLoad uses the same types of observable speculation flaws to exfiltrate data but bases it on a new class of Intel-specific side-channel attacks utilizing a technique the investigators termed MDS, or microarchitectural data sampling. While Spectre and Meltdown attack at the cache level, ZombieLoad targets Intel HyperThreading (HT), the company's implementation of symmetric multithreading, by trying to snoop on the processor's line fill buffers (LFBs) used to load the L1 cache itself. In this case, side-channel leakages of data are possible if the malicious process triggers certain specific and ultimately invalid loads from memory -- hence the nickname -- that require microcode assistance from the CPU; these have side-effects on the LFBs which can be observed by methods similar to Spectre by other processes sharing the same CPU core. (Related attacks against other microarchitectural structures are analogously implemented.)

The attackers don't have control over the observed address, so they can't easily read arbitrary memory, but careful scanning for the type of data you're targeting can still make the attack effective even against the OS kernel. For example, since URLs can be picked out of memory, this apparent proof of concept shows a separate process running on the same CPU victimizing Firefox to extract the URL as the user types it in. This works because as the user types, the values of the individual keystrokes go through the LFB to the L1 cache, allowing the malicious process to observe the changes and extract characters. There is much less data available to the attacking process but that also means there is less to scan, making real-time attacks like this more feasible.

That said, because the attack is specific to architectural details of HT (and the authors of the attack say they even tried on other SMT CPUs without success), this particular exploit wouldn't work even against modern high-SMT count Power CPUs like POWER9. It certainly won't work against a Power Mac because no Power Mac CPU ever implemented SMT, not even the G5. While Mozilla is deploying a macOS-specific fix, we don't need it in TenFourFox, nor do we need other mitigations. It's especially bad news for Intel because nearly every Intel chip since 2011 is apparently vulnerable and the performance impact of fixing ZombieLoad varies anywhere from Intel's Pollyanna estimate of 3-9% to up to 40% if HT must be disabled completely.

Is this a major concern for users? Not as such: although the attacks appear to be practical and feasible, they require you to run dodgy software and that's a bad idea on any platform because dodgy software has any number of better ways of pwning your computer. So don't run dodgy programs!

Meanwhile, TenFourFox FPR14 final should be available for testing this weekend.

TenFourFox not affected by the addon apocalypse

Tonight's Firefox add-on apocalypse, traced to a mistakenly expired intermediate signing certificate, is currently roiling Firefox users worldwide. It bit me on my Talos II, which really cheesed me off because it tanked all my carefully constructed site containers. (And that's an official Mozilla addon!)

This brief post is just to reassure you that TenFourFox is unaffected -- I disagreed with signature enforcement on add-ons from the beginning and explicitly disabled it.