Quote Originally Posted by Banquo's Ghost
I've had a look at Camino, but unless you're going to tell me Safari has major security flaws, I don't really see the advantages of changing. What does it lack?
I'm not aware of Safari having any major security holes at the moment. But when I use it, I miss my Mozilla environment. I find web pages render a little more predictably with Firefox/Camino/Mozilla than with any other browser. Also, I have an unreasonable and undying love for anything that's cross-platform. I like being able to import my preferences and bookmarks and whatnot from X to WinXP and back again.

Internet Explorer is a non-starter for me. Check out the chief architect's reasoning as to why it's so bloated.

That highlights one of the inevitable dilemmas in IE development: tight integration with Windows which means that troubleshooting can relate to almost anything but the browser itself.

"There's benefits and there's costs to it," Wilson concedes, but he doesn't see much merit in trying to separate IE from its Windows underpinnings. "To ship an operating system that didn't have a browser in it wouldn't be sensible. It's a system service. The interesting part for us is we get to rely on the Windows system to provide capabilities for us."

And yet, despite relying on Windows to provide many capabilities, a standard download for IE7 weighs in at 15MB, compared to Firefox's comparatively slimline 6MB. What's that about?

"The big challenge for us is we don't run on just one version of Windows. We can't rely on things that are just in Windows Vista." Relying on anything in Vista might be dangerous, I want to suggest, but that might just induce my PC to crash again out of spite.

Wilson is still talking as I fume. "A lot of the things that make IE larger are really that it's delivered as a set of system services that are essentially atoms for Windows. You can use just parts of the browser. It's componentised very specifically so you can do that."

In other words, IE has to be huge and difficult to debug because it relies on system services for practically everything. If there's a quirk in the service, there will be a quirk in IE. Sounds like a horrible idea to this lemur. Gimme sandbox programming that doesn't hook into the system at the deepest possible level, please.