Category: Web Browsers

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CNET posted an article today, Concern grows over browser security, about the rise in browser-based attacks (mostly spoofed sites for phishing, but also attempts to install viruses and other malware through web browser security holes).

What’s interesting about the article is that nowhere does it mention Mozilla, Opera or Safari.

Could it be that attacks through these browsers are less common than attacks through Internet Explorer, even adjusted for market share? (Sure, IE has more than 90%, but there are a lot of people using the others.)

Or could it be that the author has succumbed to the “Web Browser = MSIE” belief?

If nothing else, you’d think that their statistics would have a bit more information, but it’s a single number for “browser” attacks. Nothing more detailed than that.

To be fair, the press release doesn’t provide any better numbers. In fact, it mentions no browser by name at all. (One can hope their data is a bit more detailed, but the purpose of the study appears to have been to identify trends in types of attacks, not in the software targeted.) And yet IE is the only browser CNET mentions, despite the alternatives’ better security records.

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OK, that may be a bit melodramatic, but there are two interesting and complementary bits of news:

The Mozilla Foundation was announced as a non-profit that will be the new home for Mozilla. AOL has donated $2 million for start-up funding, and various other companies have announced plans to support it.

AOL is dismantling Netscape. Some people are being laid off, others are being reassigned. Many of them intend to keep working on Mozilla, either for the Mozilla Foundation or on a volunteer basis. Heck, Dave Hyatt has kept contributing despite working on Safari for Apple, and I’m fairly certain I’ve seen Ian “Hixie” Hickson on Bugzilla since he started at Opera.

Pros: Mozilla will be fully independent. No more choosing the lesser of two evils (Microsoft vs. AOL)! The last few versions of Netscape have been pretty redundant anyway, and Mozilla has been making a name for itself over the past year.

Cons: Certain drop in funding, possible drop in confidence, likely drop in visibility (or at least name recognition). Mozilla’s already going through a transition period in terms of the project architecture (from monolithic suite to separate components using a common base). And news sources that don’t understand the implications of open source, or don’t connect the first announcement with the second, are going to assume Mozilla is disappearing as well.

Other projects (Apache, Gnome, KDE, and of course Linux) have shown that you can keep a resource-intensive open-source project going. I don’t know how rough the transition will be, but I have no doubts that Mozilla can keep going.

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The new beta of OmniWeb uses Apple’s WebCore, the Konqueror-based code used to display pages in Safari.

What makes this so interesting is that OmniWeb was the first web browser designed to really work with OS X. IIRC MS really didn’t do much to IE except add the compatibility code and change the icons.

A lot has been going on in the web browser world over the last year and a half. Sure, the Browser War has been declared over, sure, Netscape has been declared dead time and time again, but IE has been stagnating ever since it “won.” Except for bug fixes, Microsoft hasn’t released a new version of IE for the Mac in over three years, or for Windows in almost two. They’ve declared they won’t be continuing IE on the Mac at all, and there’s talk of tying future Windows versions directly to the operating system, so that you can’t upgrade IE without upgrading Windows.

With the free availability of Gecko, the rendering engine that Mozilla and Netscape use to display pages, projects to develop web browers were springing up everywhere. People were trying out crazy new ideas like tabbed browsing (not the same thing as MDI), which proved popular enough it ended up back in Mozilla, where it became the most popular feature. Now every major browser but IE has it.

Now, the same thing looks to be happening with KHTML. What started out as a way for the KDE file manager to display web pages has become a very nice web browser, and since (like Gecko) it is available under an open source license, anyone is free to develop their own browser around it. Apple built Safari on top of it, making improvements where necessary, and made it easier for other Mac applications to use the same code. OmniWeb brings the number of KHTML browsers to at least three, and I suspect more will follow.

IE will probably continue to rule the statistics as long as Microsoft controls both it and Windows, and as long as Windows remains dominant on the desktop. But the innovation has moved elsewhere, and there are at least three other major browser types out there (Gecko-based, KHTML-based, and Opera) that can display pages very well, thank you.

With luck, this may begin moving us back to a platform-neutral Web, as it was originally intended.