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IE8 May Be End of the Line For Internet Explorer
snydeq writes "InfoWorld's Randall Kennedy reports on rumors that IE8 may be Internet Explorer's swan song: 'IE8 is the last version of the Internet Explorer Web browser,' Kennedy writes. 'It seems that Microsoft is preparing to throw in the towel on its Internet Explorer engine once and for all.' And what will replace it? Some are still claiming that Microsoft will go with WebKit, which is used by Safari and Chrome. The WebKit story, Kennedy contends, could be a feint and that Microsoft will instead adopt Gazelle, Microsoft Research's brand-new engine that thinks like an OS. 'This new engine will supposedly be more secure than Firefox or even Chrome, making copious use of sandboxing to keep its myriad plug-ins isolated and the overall browser process model protected.'" The sticking point will be what Microsoft does about compatibility for ActiveX apps.
The author states: At least, that's what I'm hearing through the grapevine ... but the fantasy woven by the author).
The author is effectively saying his story is not credible! Slashdot is supposed to run with a hypothetical situation about IE8 demise instead of commenting on real news? It should be fun scanning through these comments to find out who bites (not the big one
A lot of people seem to have little-to-no understanding as to what ActiveX is. It is a plug-in infrastructure based on COM, nothing more, nothing less. It allows for a library to provide a visual component that can be loaded by another application to display content. That plug-in infrastructure was used in Internet Explorer to load browser plug-ins. Those plug-ins run within the browser process under the current user security context. There is absolutely no functional difference between ActiveX in Internet Explorer on Windows or an XPCOM plug-in for Firefox on Linux.
The problem is that in both cases those plug-ins have to have a fairly wide amount of functionality. If that plug-in is intended to display video then it has to be able to work with the video API of the platform in question. As such these plug-ins generally cannot be sandboxed too tightly otherwise they would no longer be able to function and their usefulness of being able to extend the functionality of the browser is lost.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/browse/type:7
This website lists the XPCOM plug-ins available for Firefox. There are quite a few more if you follow the link to the bottom. If a vulnerability is identified in ANY of those plug-ins a successful exploit will be fully capable of trashing the profile of the current user and there is nothing that Firefox can do to stop it, even on Linux.