Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can remember their name forever now!
You appear to have forgotten how to scroll up and notice that the name of the OP is not my name. ;)
Removing XSLT for a more secure browser
111–120 of 352 posts
Re: Removing XSLT for a more secure browser
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
Your response is like seeing the cops going to the wrong house to kick in your neighbors door, breaking their ornaments in their entry way, and then saying to yourself, "Good. I hate yellow, and would never have any of that tacky shit in my house." As your first sentence of your comment indicates, the fact that it's supported and there for people to use doesn't (and hasn't) result in you being forced to use it in you…
Yes but software, and especially browser, complexity has balooned enormously over the years. And while XSLT probably plays a tiny part in that, it's likely embedded in every Electron app that could do in 1MB what it takes 500 MB to do, makes it incrementally harder to build and maintain a competing browser, etc., etc. It's not zero cost. I do tend to support backwards compatibility over constant updates and breakage,…
Re: Removing XSLT for a more secure browser
#113Good, XSLT was crap. I wrote an RSS feed XSLT template. Worst dev experience ever. No one is/was using XSLT. Removing unused code is a win for browsers. Every anti bloat HNer should be cheering
The first few times you use it, XSLT is insane . But once something clicks, you figure out the kinds of things it’s good for. I am not really a functional programming guy. But XSLT is a really cool application of functional programming for data munging, and I wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t used it enough for it to click.
Re: Removing XSLT for a more secure browser
#114I think that's sad. XSLT is in my point a view a very misunderstood technology. It gets hated on a lot. I wonder if this hate is by people who actually used and understood it, though. In any case, more often than not this is by people who in the same sentence endorse JavaScript (which, by any objective way of measuring is just a language far more poorly designed).
Re: Removing XSLT for a more secure browser
#115I don't use XSLT and don't object to this, but seeing "security" cited made me realize how reflexively distrustful I've become of them using that justification for a given decision. Is this one actually about security? Who knows!
Didn't this come pretty directly after someone found some security vulns? I think the logic was, this is a huge chunk of code that is really complex which almost nobody uses outside of toy examples (and rss feeds). Sure, we fixed the issue just reported, but who knows what else is lurking here, it doesn't seem worth it. As a general rule, simplifying and removing code is one of the best things you can do for security…
Sure, but that’s not what they’re doing in the big picture. XSLT is a tiny drop in the bucket compared to all the surface area of the niche, non-standard APIs tacked onto Chromium. It’s classic EEE.
Re: Removing XSLT for a more secure browser
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Cancelling XSLT is going in the wrong direction (IMHO). XSLT isn't going anywhere: hardwiring into the browser an implementation that's known to be insecure and is basically unmaintained is what's going away. The people doing the wailing/rending/gnashing about the removal of libxslt needed to step up to fix and maintain it. It seems like something an extension ought to be capable of, and if not, fix the extension A…
> XSLT isn't going anywhere: hardwiring into the browser an implementation that's known to be insecure and is basically unmaintained is what's going away. Not having it available from the browser really reduces the ability to use it in many cases, and lots of the nonbrowser XSLT ecosystem relies on the same insecure, unmaintained implementation. There is at least one major alternative (Saxon), and if browser support…
Re: Removing XSLT for a more secure browser
#117The "severe security issue" in libxml2 they mention is actually a non-issue and the code in question isn't even used by Chrome. I'm all for switching to memory-safe languages but badmouthing OSS projects is poor style.
The issue in question is just one of the several long-unfixed vulnerabilities we know about, from a library that doesn't have that many hands or eyes on it to begin with.
Re: Removing XSLT for a more secure browser
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
FWIW the original post explicitly mentioned this use case and offered two ways to workaround.
Gotta love the reference to the header element. There used to be an icon in the browser URL bar when a site had a feed, but they nuked that too.
This is actually a feature of Orion[0], and among the reasons why I believe it to be one of the most (power) user-oriented browsers in active development.
It's such a basic thing that there's really no good reason to remove the feature outright (as mainstream browsers have), especially when the cited reason is to "reduce clutter" which has been added back tenfold with garbage like chatbots and shopping assistants.
Re: Removing XSLT for a more secure browser
#119Earlier quoted context omitted.
I block JS, too. And so does about 1-2% of all Web users. JavaScript should NOT be REQUIRED to view a website. It makes web browsing more insecure and less private, makes page load times slower, and wastes energy.
> And so does about 1-2% of all Web users. To put that in context, about 6 percent of US homes have no internet access at all. The “I turn off JS” crowd is at least 3x smaller than the crowd with no access at all. The JS ship sailed years ago. You can turn it off but a bunch of things simply will not work and no amount of insisting that it would not be required will change that.
To quote someone who lived before me: don't accept the things you cannot change. Change the things you cannot accept.
And the no-JS ship has not sailed. Government websites require accessibility, and at least in the UK, do not rely on JS.
Re: Removing XSLT for a more secure browser
#120To anyone who says to use JS instead of XSLT: I block JS because it is also used for ads, tracking and bloat in general. I don't block XSLT because I haven't come across malicious use of XSLT before (though to be fair, I haven't come across much use of XSLT at all). I think being able to do client-side templating without JS is an important feature and I hope that since browser vendors are removing XSLT they will add…
> I block JS The percentage of visitors who block JS is extremely small. Many of those visits are actually bots and scrapers that don’t interpret JS. Of the real users who block JS, most of them will enable JS for any website they actually want to visit if it’s necessary. What I’m trying to say is that making any product decision for the extremely small (but vocal) minority of users who block JS is not a good product…