Google has just been reinventing its Chrome recently, but according to Forbes, the company has also revealed a powerful reason to quit the browser and move to its competitors.
In a recent shocking report by ZDNet, Google engineers themselves have revealed that a certain "unsafe" code found within Chrome is in fact responsible for about 70% of the browser's security vulnerabilities along with 125 to 130 "critical bugs that have been collectively found in the browser over the span of the last year.
Google Chrome Unsafe Code C and C++
The engineers pointed fingers on C and C++, both 48 and 35-year-old programming languages that don't actually come with certain restrictions or even warnings in order to prevent or also alert developers when they are trying to make basic memory management errors.
These early coding errors then result in certain memory management vulnerabilities that are being introduced within the applications. Memory management flaws are actually the highest form of vulnerability for hackers to penetrate.
This problem is ranked first, fifth, and even seventh in the list of the top 100 dangerous vulnerabilities made by Mitre, which is a non-profit organization that works by managing the US government's own database of certain software vulnerabilities.
The situation does not have to remain this way. While all of the Chromium-based browsers just like Microsoft Edge, Brave, Opera, and etc. are all built on the exact same code and are therefore sharing the same weakness, there is one alternative that actually stands out, Firefox.
Quite different from Chromium browsers, the Firefox is actually built using Rust, which is a sort of safety-focused programming language that is specifically designed to work as memory safe.
Mozilla Firefox Rust
The creators of Firefox, Mozilla, actually developed Rust and also integrated the code into Firefox just over three years ago. Google states that it is also looking towards Rust, JavaScript, Swift, Kotlin, and also Java as different programming languages to replace both the C and C++ code within Chrome.
The company is also working on certain C++ libraries after they have just admitted that its own strategy of sandboxing has actually reached the maximum benefits it can offer when looking at performance.
In the end, it is still to Google's own credit to look for a solution to address the current memory unsafety problem located at the heart of Chrome and Chromium by every means possible. There is still no timeline as to how long it will actually take for the company to fix this problem.
The company is still weighing out the certain options it has to replace their current C and C++ but for those who are currently looking for an existing ready-made replacement, Forbes actually says that Firefox "looks like a good bet."
Could it be the year of the Firefox?
