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Richard Stallman Speaks About UEFI
An anonymous reader writes "Despite weaknesses in the Linux-hostile 'secure boot' mechanism, both Fedora and Ubuntu decided to facilitate it, by essentially adopting two different approaches. Richard Stallman has finally spoken out on this subject. He notes that 'if the user doesn't control the keys, then it's a kind of shackle, and that would be true no matter what system it is.' He says, 'Microsoft demands that ARM computers sold for Windows 8 be set up so that the user cannot change the keys; in other words, turn it into restricted boot.' Stallman adds that 'this is not a security feature. This is abuse of the users. I think it ought to be illegal.'"
Apple didn't ban Firefox, and nothing stopped Chrome, Opera, or any of the other hundreds of web browser apps from popping up. Let's be clear: Apple didn't ban web browsers on the app store, they banned Javascript engines that run arbitrary code, a pretty specific restriction, although one that admittedly has wide-ranging repercussions.
Google's (and most other developer's) solution of the problem was to just use Apple's layout and javascript engines and build their browsers around that. Opera's approach was to do the javascript and layout server-side and just do the rendering locally. I believe there was at least one browser that streamed the browser as video. Looking at the different web browsers available for iOS, there is a pretty wide range in user interface design and feature support. iCab Mobile adds gestures, Chrome adds incognito mode and unlimited tabs, etc.
For something like Chrome, which is a webkit browser anyhow, this isn't even a terribly big change. In fact, the only major issue is that Apple doesn't expose their JIT javascript engine to third parties, so third party browsers that rely on Apple's javascript engine suffer from rather poor javascript performance. Hopefully Apple will loosen that restriction.