Live data from Hacker News

Browser-Wars History: MD5-Hashed Posts Declassified

robert.ocallahan.org

21–30 of 75 posts

Re: Browser-Wars History: MD5-Hashed Posts Declassified

#21
post #13
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Someone said the same thing in the comments. In a reply, the author does not know why the MD5 fails but confirms that the post is correct: I wondered if anyone would check :-). I'm not sure what the problem is with the first post. It's been a long time. You'll have to take my word for it that the first post is the right text :-).

Different encodings for line endings?

hashed-blog1.txt contains HTML markup for paragraphs, while all others are in plain text.

Re: Browser-Wars History: MD5-Hashed Posts Declassified

#22
At the time this internal skepticism about the future of Gecko was very palpable from outside. Which is why it was infuriating to see Mozilla jumping on every bandwagon they could, eventually ending up with the OS silliness: it really felt like they were trying to run from their own browser and from their own tech, like they were ashamed of not being cool.

Thank god they eventually “saw the light” and they’re now back on track.

Re: Browser-Wars History: MD5-Hashed Posts Declassified

#23
post #9

Opera made the bet he proposed and lead themselves down a path to irrelevance.

As one of the few who paid for a web browser (paid $29 for Opera 7 in 2003), it looked to me like Opera really had no choice.

There was a post from an Opera insider that I can't find but it was basically this: the web's complexity was evolving faster than the Opera team could maintain their proprietary Presto rendering engine.

Switching away from Presto and building on WebKit was a basic matter of survival. Yes, they still became irrelevant but they would have also stayed irrelevant with their Presto engine.

I agree with their assessment because around 2009, I started encountering more and more web pages that broke Opera. The Opera forums had more and more complaints from users reporting broken web pages. The Presto engine was becoming a liability.

It was a vicious feedback loop because web authors wouldn't bother to test their sites with Opera ... which led to more user frustrations. I had to switch to Chrome to get a usable web surfing experience back. I originally paid for Opera because it had the fastest rendering engine which was very helpful for slow dialup connections. As Presto started falling further behind, that speed advantage was negated.

Opera did try to some interesting features such as "Unite" which -- if you squint a certain way -- was a form of p2p decentralization. Yes, it's interesting to have a built-in web server in the browser but not enough people cared about it.

The author's predictions for Firefox's Gecko engine meeting the same irrelevant fate as Presto didn't happen because unlike Opera, Mozilla from 2004-2014 got massive funding from Google. Mozilla could afford to keep programmers enhancing the Gecko engine. Opera couldn't do the same with Presto.

Re: Browser-Wars History: MD5-Hashed Posts Declassified

#24
post #21
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Different encodings for line endings?

hashed-blog1.txt contains HTML markup for paragraphs, while all others are in plain text.

Taking them out has not resulted in the correct hash, or maybe I forgot something

Neither adding a \n to the last line makes it match

Re: Browser-Wars History: MD5-Hashed Posts Declassified

#25
>* There is a huge overhang of security-critical bugs; we have to choose between addressing that and making forward progress. We are putting code-cleanup projects on the back burner for the same reason.*

Have they considered rewriting it in R... oh, hang on.

Re: Browser-Wars History: MD5-Hashed Posts Declassified

#26
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

hashed-blog1.txt contains HTML markup for paragraphs, while all others are in plain text.

Taking them out has not resulted in the correct hash, or maybe I forgot something Neither adding a \n to the last line makes it match

I also tried it with some line endings :)

There might be some other slight changes in formatting which is still missing.

Re: Browser-Wars History: MD5-Hashed Posts Declassified

#27
post #12

Cool idea to just post the hashes for the future. I think I might do it too on my blog :-)

Maybe use SHA256 rather than MD5. A few years hence ease of producing MD5 collisions might render moot anything that you had to say.

I don't think that's necessary. This isn't really a cryptographic use of the hash. Between the legitimate text of the blog entry and whatever arbitrary (likely nonsensical) string produces an MD5 collision, it's going to be pretty obvious which is which.

Re: Browser-Wars History: MD5-Hashed Posts Declassified

#29
post #14

I expected an article about 1990s browser wars. 2007-2008 is not ancient in my book.

10 years is a long time. This was back when I still heard people seriously asking if the internet would last. It was even plausible! Google was only a few years out from its IPO. Few people thought the internet could help elect a president (and I don't mean the current guy).

A lot changed in the last ten years. It may not seem like it because most of those changes were refinements on things we already had at the time. We've just been in a long period of revisions. New programming tools, new social networks, new [insert thing we've had since the '90s]. The late '90s and first half of the '00s were full of radical changes, so it seems less significant in context.

We're probably on the brink of another radical upheaval like the '90s. There's lots of money flowing around, lots of amazing and well-refined tools, and all the low hanging fruit is more or less captured. No one's getting rich on "x as a service" anymore. People will have to really change something to capture the next huge payday, and the first few will set off a cascade of changed expectations.

Re: Browser-Wars History: MD5-Hashed Posts Declassified

#30
post #20
post #2

> the more code engines share, the more de facto standardization of bugs we would see, so having genuinely separate implementations is very important. Well it's not like there aren't any bugs in the specs. And whether there are bugs in the code or the specification, it's the same process for fixing them : politics :)

There has been a lot of progress recently on the web-platform-tests project [1]. This is a cross-vendor effort to improve interoperability on the web platform through testing. Historically the process for building web-platform features has been to write a spec and then assume that implementations of the spec would reach compatibility in an ad-hoc manner by patching until sites worked. The big innovation of the last d…

Very nice. I haven't heard of these tests before.
Post reply on HN