How to kill a web browser

Posted Oct 21, 2004 11:56 UTC (Thu) by zezaz (subscriber, #5465) [Link]

This is most probably a security issue. If firefox dies like this, it should not be too hard for a competent cracker to write a page that relies on a buffer overflow to execute code on the client PC. This is not just about your browser dying.

I don't think that this article said there was magic in MSIEs more robust behaviour on this tests either. One of the biggest strengths of MS is the ability to hire the resources to make their products adhere to some quality standards. They relied on this to overcome all their concurrents.

This ability certainly has been much underestimated by many, claiming that IE was horribly bug-ridden, whereas mozilla/firefox/links/emacs-w3-mode... was much better because of code quality. This is the point of this article, and i completely agree with its author. MS should not be underestimated, and opensource programs should not be overestimated.

Posted Oct 21, 2004 17:19 UTC (Thu) by smoogen (subscriber, #97) [Link]

All this means is that someone at MS wrote a test case that fed garbage HTML to the browser and then they fixed it whenever it crashed. It's not as if they are just magically smarter or better, they just had the resources to test a wider coverage.

They might even have used a bunch of tests that Spyglass QA (the original writers of MSIE1.0) gave them as part of the sale. Netscape also had a large testing amount of pages that contained lots of bad text for people to try at. The main issue is that it is man-power intensive in looking at pages and seeing a) if a crash occurred and b) where it occurred.