Chrome canary and certificates9/19/2023 ![]() ![]() After all, setting up and running a root store is expensive, and Mozilla thinks the project is well worth it given what advantages it brings to other open-source projects. Just like Google, Mozilla also hopes to provide a consistent Firefox experience across different operating systems with its root store, all while further promoting and advancing the free and open web. Mozilla deems its approach an important pillar for the open-source web community, as the open source nature of its root store makes it a part of many other open projects, like Linux distributions. Mozilla explains in a blog post that Firefox and Thunderbird have been using the company’s own root store since their inception. ![]() Thus, this could also have implications for the web certification infrastructure. This means that new technologies usually have to receive Google’s blessing to make it. After all, most popular browsers other than Firefox and Safari are already based on Google’s Chromium engine, giving it a market share of well over a third. The promises are certainly noble, but they are also a sign that Google is further tightening its grip on the open web. ![]() With Google’s push into the public key infrastructure, the company wants to help make the certification process both easier, more automatic, less error-prone, and more streamlined. With the launch of its program, Google wants to “work alongside CA owners to define and operationalize the next generation of the Web PKI.” Web PKI is short for public key infrastructure and is the all-encompassing term for what we’ve been talking about here - the set of rules and policies that connected devices follow in order to establish trust between each other. Just like Mozilla’s approach, Google’s new root store allows the company to become independent of an operating system, and it also has the benefit that Google gets a say in the business of certification issuing. Mozilla tackled this potential problem early by shipping Firefox with its own root store, all while accounting for OS level security guidelines and virus scanners. You might never notice much of a problem with that, but it can be an issue for web developers at times. While this strategy is fine from a security perspective, it can lead to inconsistent Chrome behavior across different operating systems. ![]() Historically, Chrome has relied on the underlying operating system’s root store on desktop, be it macOS, Windows, or Linux. ![]()
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