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Browser-Wars History: MD5-Hashed Posts Declassified

robert.ocallahan.org

71–75 of 75 posts

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

#71
post #37

Somehow, everybody pretends as if Webkit is some proprietary, closed source rendering engine, but after all, it is the great success of the KDE/Konqueror rendering engine, being adopted by some huge corporations (Apple, Google). [1] While I appreciate that we still have the independent Firefox and its brand new Quantum engine, sometimes I feel like the Konqueror/KHTML team does not receive the appropriate tribute for…

While I largely agree, a ton of work was done by Apple before Webkit was usable. Most sites would show subtle rendering glitches and it took a while before it matured.

The way I remember it is that KHTML and Mozilla worked perfectly fine if websites followed the real standards instead of MSIE's defacto standard. Which, back in the early '00s, was often not the case.

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

#72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FxOS started in 2011, not 2008. But yeah, that's the usual scapegoat to explain any of Mozilla's issues from the last 5 (or 10?) years. You also totally misunderstand the goal pursued with FxOS, which had nothing to do with "run from their own browser and tech". If anything, the current work to remove XUL and xpcom puts Firefox closer to how FxOS was built, not further away. At the time some employees even build a ne…

> You also totally misunderstand the goal pursued with FxOS, which had nothing to do with "run from their own browser and tech". FxOS embraced web technologies, but didn't embrace the browser . I think Mozilla is still having a hard time embracing the browser, though at least now the will is there. Who at Mozilla ever talks about hypermedia? About link text? About navigation? About bookmarks? FxOS was a demonstration…

You are wrong on the long term goal and vision for FxOS: in 2.6 we started to add very webby stuff to the overall UX with "pin the web" features.

And I wonder who the platform team was supporting then, because they were not supporting b2g either...

I'm sympathetic to the idea of building a great desktop browser, but at this point in time that should not be MoCo priority #1. Hopefully the platform improvements done recently will be reused in a different context.

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

#73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You also totally misunderstand the goal pursued with FxOS, which had nothing to do with "run from their own browser and tech". FxOS embraced web technologies, but didn't embrace the browser . I think Mozilla is still having a hard time embracing the browser, though at least now the will is there. Who at Mozilla ever talks about hypermedia? About link text? About navigation? About bookmarks? FxOS was a demonstration…

You are wrong on the long term goal and vision for FxOS: in 2.6 we started to add very webby stuff to the overall UX with "pin the web" features. And I wonder who the platform team was supporting then, because they were not supporting b2g either... I'm sympathetic to the idea of building a great desktop browser, but at this point in time that should not be MoCo priority #1. Hopefully the platform improvements done re…

> You are wrong on the long term goal and vision for FxOS: in 2.6 we started to add very webby stuff to the overall UX with "pin the web" features.

(I should say that I don't think there was a more webby version of Firefox OS that would have had more success.)

The webby features weren't the point of FxOS. It was always clear what the point was: create a phone OS/platform built entirely on web technologies, with Gecko as the core. UX was an afterthought and the basic transitions were all based on phone apps and not the web. And it

> And I wonder who the platform team was supporting then, because they were not supporting b2g either...

It's interesting that you felt they weren't supporting b2g, because from the other side we got the message that other things couldn't get done because of b2g.

There were really three directions vying for attention with Platform: Firefox OS, Firefox, and Platform's own goals (generally related to advancing web technologies). Notably when Platform was moved into the Firefox group there was also a message that we should stop trying to get ahead on new web APIs, and the focus became very clear: support Firefox. At the time of Firefox OS it wasn't at all clear what the focus was.

When things are confusing I think there's a tendency to fall back on your own competencies, and for Platform that meant sticking to what they knew how to do, not the most most gnarly (but potentially very impactful) b2g needs.

> I'm sympathetic to the idea of building a great desktop browser, but at this point in time that should not be MoCo priority #1. Hopefully the platform improvements done recently will be reused in a different context.

The desktop browser is why Mozilla has any money to do anything, of course it should be priority #1! People spend millions of hours every day in Firefox, and those people are worthy of attention.

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

#74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are wrong on the long term goal and vision for FxOS: in 2.6 we started to add very webby stuff to the overall UX with "pin the web" features. And I wonder who the platform team was supporting then, because they were not supporting b2g either... I'm sympathetic to the idea of building a great desktop browser, but at this point in time that should not be MoCo priority #1. Hopefully the platform improvements done re…

> You are wrong on the long term goal and vision for FxOS: in 2.6 we started to add very webby stuff to the overall UX with "pin the web" features. (I should say that I don't think there was a more webby version of Firefox OS that would have had more success.) The webby features weren't the point of FxOS. It was always clear what the point was: create a phone OS/platform built entirely on web technologies, with Gecko…

Ian,

I'm not sure why you think you know what the absolute truth about "the point of FxOS", but that doesn't matter anymore.

The way they played the "platform can't cater to all needs" story is a shame. I was naive enough to think I could trust people in MoCo to not just lie to my face but they acted like any corp. No real justification was given (I asked for numbers, bugs, etc. for months with no answer), 2 VPs did the dirty work for their CEO and the top level module owner declined both to support a community led project around b2g and to write down that they declined (exercise left to the reader to guess who this is. Hint: Brendan Eich was not top level module owner anymore).

Read [0], watch [1] and tell me if you are proud of your leadership for not even engaging a discussing on the topic.

[0] https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/mozilla.dev.platform/k...

[1] https://air.mozilla.org/b2g-os-announcements-2016-09-27/

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

#75
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't it feasible to construct two sets of legible texts with the same MD5 hash now?

Legible, maybe, but I don't think you'll be able to collide the hash with natural language, so you will need an excuse as to why the revealed text has weird nonsense in it that is actually there to collide the hash. 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…

Could you produce collisions using only non-visible/zero width characters?
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