The Firefox 95.0 update comes with enhanced sandbox security

With Firefox's 95.0 release already out, the browser seems to have doubled security in a new and exciting way.

Rust instead of C and C ++ code

The updated browser will have new sandboxing technology that will protect it from errors and vulnerabilities in its code. Sandboxing is a fairly common method of resolving potential security issues and works by isolating the code, to prevent any vulnerabilities in the applications from having access to the entire Firefox. The technology is called RLBox, and has been working as a prototype for Mac and Linux Firefox for some time, but is finally coming in full form for the Windows edition. It was developed by the combined efforts of the University of California, San Diego, and the University of Texas, and represents the next level because it can separate pieces of code within applications.

Mozilla specifically targeted several Firefox components with RLBox as a precautionary effort - Graphite font rendering engine, Hunspell spell checker, Ogg multimedia container format, Expat XML parser, and Woff2 web font compression format are all isolated. This way, if there are problems with the code, it will not pose a threat to the entire browser. Speaking about security earlier, Mozilla explained that it is a great incentive for RLBox to work with C and C ++, which are known to have security flaws. Most of Firefox's newer code is done in Rust, which is much safer, but there is a lot of old code that is still in use.

RLBox allows this code to be isolated so that it does not pose a threat to the rest of the system in the meantime. Firefox used to be one of the most prominent browsers, but that’s no longer the case as it has lost 46 million users in three years and is currently less popular than Microsoft’s Edge. However, Firefox is the best for PC gamers, at least for now.