5/24/2005 06:25:00 AM - Whose Line is It
Thanks to all who mentioned that there are extensions to launch IE. I knew that; I've used IEView in the past. What I meant was that I'd like to see Triton within my current tab.
I would say that Netscape made a really stupid move releasing 8.0 when they did. This is the kind of thing that should have had the CEO slam on the breaks. Whose bright idea was it to release a browser with known security holes? Obviously they did a fantastic job of patching it right away. But why didn't they just patch first?
Ben's comments about "built on Firefox technology" were close to the mark. Mozilla.org is the vendor for Firefox. When there are public exploits that steal cookies and you have 50 million people vulnerable, you patch them quickly. If someone else redistributes the browser, they have access to the same source code. I don't want my browser to be vulnerable any longer than it has to be.
What could have made the situation better would be if only some core piece was replacable. Since I don't know enough about the architecture, I can't say whether this would have been the GRE or not. But that's what a shared runtime is about, right? You just need to patch the library and not everything that uses it. I look forward to the day when the GRE is truly separate.
