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WebKit For Metacity/Mutter CSS Theming?
An anonymous reader writes "As Metacity (the GNOME window manager) evolves into Mutter, the question of CSS themes and how to implement them has come up. One of the proposals was WebKit, which the author asked more specifically about on his blog. It seems that WebKit, being a very fast rendering engine, would allow Mutter to have unprecedented power, not to mention being nearly future-proofed. As a major bonus, going this way could allow GNOME to share themes with KDE, which is apparently already headed towards a dependency on WebKit. Many people will reflexively recoil at the idea of a browser being mixed with a window manager. But it's important to remember that WebKit is not a browser — it's just a rendering engine, and it's not where all the security issues come from. So, what are the real technical issues at stake here? What are the pros and cons of using WebKit underneath GNOME rendering?"
"Lets see, some person makes a "theme" that exploits a flaw in WebKit"
Could you explain to me why this would be a greater security risk than some person making a "theme" that exploits a flaw in Metacity?
Wait, how does this make it easier? Metacity's code is open already.
There are going to be a ton more crackers wanting to find ways to exploit Safari and Chrome than there will ever be wanting to find flaws in a WM.
And a ton more hackers working to fix those flaws.
Basically, without WebKit GNOME is just another DE, interesting, but not worth the work to exploit. On the other hand, with a ready-made script, it wouldn't take too long for someone with no skills to exploit it.
So you're basically arguing in favor of security through obscurity, and against code reuse?
Also, I fail to see how it's more dangerous for the average user to have their WM compromised than their browser. It's a lot easier to trick people into visiting a website, just once, than it is to convince them to install your theme.
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