[Sigia-l] Integrated online thesauri

[Benjamin Kahn]

I hesitate to say that you're missing the point, because I'm not sure
that's true.  My point is that web sites are software.  Since the first
(and thus far only) piece of software from this company I have seen is
buggy and temperamental, I'm already skeptical of this company's ability
to create other software I might want to use.

Now, in regards to your comments about firefox.  I happen to use firefox
because I work for a Linux company.  Firefox is probably the best Linux
browser there is.  I use it for that reason.  (I also recommend firefox
to people not on Windows because of popup blocking, the extension
system, the XUL development environment, cookie managment, tabs, etc.)

Web browsers are fairly scary programs in general.  They download
untrusted and potentially hostile code as part of their design.  They
use this code to (as fast as possible) render and display complex pages
and to run small (and sometimes not so small) interpreted scripts.  They
do all this using hundreds of thousands of lines of code.  

Microsoft spent a lot of time, effort, and money running this type of
script against Internet Explorer and fixing the problems they found.
All this effort has paid off for Microsoft, and they should be
congratulated for finding and fixing these glaring security problems in
their browser.  However, they have a number of other large security
problems including the concepts of zones, ActiveX, and tying IE to the
OS.

To some extent, firefox's security problems are excusable.  The project
is still young, and its market share is still low enough to make it less
interesting to hackers.  As it becomes more popular, that will change.
It will be interesting to see how well firefox fares as hackers start to
target it.  On the other hand, the security problems you mention are
already being fixed, and should be solved soon.  Maybe that's the answer
-- having very fast response times when problems are discovered.

On Wed, 2004-10-27 at 20:05 -0400, Boniface Lau wrote:
> > From: Benjamin Kahn
> >  
> > Bleh. That web site renders horribly on Firefox. I don't usually see
> > too many web sites that are public facing that are so IE specific.
> 
> The layout is extremely fragile. It uses a bunch of breaks to ensure
> that the body text does not run into the black banner. But due to an
> CSS error, when the page is rendered in Firefox, the black banner ran
> into the top navigation bar and search box. IE's error handling did
> not screw up the layout.
> 
> BTW, according to:
> 
> http://www.securityfocus.com/archive/1/378632/2004-10-15/2004-10-21/0
> 
> when feeding malformed html pages to various browsers...
> 
> MF> All browsers but Microsoft Internet Explorer kept crashing on a
> MF> regular basis due to NULL pointer references, memory corruption,
> MF> buffer overflows, sometimes memory exhaustion;
> 
> 
> Boniface
> 
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