Browser-Wars History: MD5-Hashed Posts Declassified

I guess I can see this seeming reasonable in the early 1940s, but it was fully crazy even before Tim built this awful Heath Robinson hypertext system we're using, let alone this century. The Network is not like cars, or pants, it's not a passing fad that societies grow bored of, it's at the heart of what we are as people, it will outlive us all.

I remember trying to explain a lot of this stuff in the early 1990s when I was a teenager - to my parents and being bewildered by how little they understood what had already happened and what would inevitably happen next. It was really like I'm stood on a beach, there has been a distant rumble and the tide is going out very fast, and I'm saying "Inland. Mum, Dad, right now. Don't stop to pick up towels and stare at the horizon, we must hurry inland or we will drown" and they don't get it at all.

You can also "see" this, once you suspect it's going on, if you're a cryptanalyst and have the tools to see inside the hash, you can see basically such collisions involving getting the internal state into an awkward place, and then forcing it from there where they want to go, that could happen by accident, but only by truly astronomical bad luck, so it's a pretty good smoking gun.

MD5 is a bad idea for situations where a machine will be verifying, because machines aren't good at saying "that's odd...", enhancing them to do so is _way_ more effort than just using SHA-256 instead. But for something like this where a human will be examining things by hand, it's fine.

For SHA-1 (which we knew at the time would be broken shortly, and then in practice it was less than a year before Google and some academics announced their full collision) we reviewed special "Exception" SHA-1 SSL issuances by hand on m.d.s.policy after the official deadline for SHA-1 issuance and I asked for one application to be explained or rejected on the basis that the requested certificate had bizarre short gibberish values for "Organizational Unit". The applicant provided an explanation (which was maybe plausible but not up to the standard of transparency needed in the circumstances) but agreed to accept certificates missing the OU value altogether instead. That's the sort of thing you'd catch if a human examines what was hashed rather than a machine. I had no reason to believe that applicant was trying anything sinister, but the point of the manual examinations was to ensure everybody can see there were no shenanigans going on (and to make it a complete pain -- if the process was easy it would have become routine and defeated the purpose of prohibiting new SHA-1 issuance, being annoying was a feature).

There are always options. Opera could have doubled-down on Presto; putting more people on the core team, and focussing efforts to keep up with, and surpass, WebKit/Gecko. After all, that's basically the option that Mozilla took, which has resulted in Firefox Quantum. Would that have worked? It's hard to say. I would guess not, but I'm not sure the alternative really did either. Maybe Opera was already too far down the web-compat death spiral to engineer a way out. I don't know of a long-term bet like Rust that could have come good at the right time.

Certainly the top-level culture of the organisations was different; Opera's leadership were very concerned with maintaining/maximising the value of their shares, whereas Mozilla is more clearly driven by ideological goals around the success of the open web. Opera also had a (historically well justified) belief that they could do more with fewer engineers than other compaines. That seemed to work up to a point, but once the difference in resources became too great it was hard to change the approach.

Certainly one lesson is that it's hard, maybe impossible, to be a niche browser with a unique rendering engine. That is arguably a failing of the web, but nevertheless it's a strong indication that arguments that e.g. Mozilla should aim Firefox at small ideologically-driven markets are dangerous. One interpretation of the Opera history is that they were too focussed for too long on the subset of users who wanted a browser with lots of features and configuration possibilities. A product that suits those people might be actively offputting to other users, so inhibiting marketshare growth when faced with competition targetting simplicity and sane defaults.

How is Quantum doing? On my computer, it's a lot slower; there are slow spinners in the tab titles and another kind of spinner for loading pages that often keeps me from seeing pages even after I already loaded them.

[But mostly I just came here to practice using an em dash correctly…]