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December 21, 2004
Thus Did Mozilla Give Birth to FireFox, Bane of the Explorer and Liberator of the Web
In an attempt to diversify my portfolio of sketchy incoming links (currently a one-trick pony of the "barely legal" crowd), I will now address the Firefox/IE flame war.
Full disclosure: I blog in FF, I develop and surf at work in IE, and I use Safari at home. There.
IMHO, and let's only consider the current versions (no ad hominem attacks on pre-SP2 XP exploits, etc): FF and IE are roughly equal in exposure to Bad Things. FF is clearly the Web Application's friend. IE Just Works, even when FF doesn't (that's a circular statement, I know, but I'm frying eggs & chicken here).
Here's where I think the heart of the matter is: both let users do dumb things, and it's not their fault. That, I think, is the point that Peter is trying to make here--FF lets me do dumb things that IE would not let me do.
Of course, the silly errors in his own OS environment are conflated for those of FF, but hey, what's a little insecurity among closed-source friends?
Best comments:
- RCME groks this in his comment.
- I grok PGP, but there's no way I'm going to the trouble of validating checksums, as this guy recommends.
- He just doesn't get it--no, I don't trust DePaul, but I would be more inclined to if they were linked back to me in a web of trust.
- It's not so much that Peter is Baghdad Bob, but that any sufficiently specialized terminology and skill is indistinguishable from magic.
- Of course monoculture is bad, silly, that's why we have supervirii (at this point I trot out my Mac user gloating: 13+ years, no virii, spyware, malware, trojans, or small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri).
But this guy intro's my point quite well. Perhaps computing will hit the point where normal people can't use computers anymore, and only people who have the skills to validate PGP signatures will get to execute software (eat that, Vinge's Singularity!). I rather think that the future is not just the Semantic Web, but the Secured Web. Blame the Lessig book I'm reading. Until PKI becomes just that, an infrastructure, and every piece of code we execute has been summarily tested and trusted under the sheets, we'll still run insecure software. Otherwise the entire IT enterprise, and the corresponding gains in productivity and efficiency gained over the last four decades, will recede under the suffocating demands of security. My boss has already proclaimed email to be dead because of spam and email-born virii. Software is next. Then the Internet.
--Nostradamus
Addendum: Usually, I sit on posts for a few days before publishing them. But to pull myself out of a writer's block, this one's raw like a football player's eggs in the morning.
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Posted by Noel at 03:35 PM
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