Re: Why write an Ada web browser ?, was: Re: GNAT Ada - DLL - MSVC

[dennison@telepath.com (Ted Dennison)]

Jeffrey Carter <jrcarter@acm.org> wrote in message news:<3D07A6FE.C6BF8CB0@acm.org>...
> I would like a browser that is more reliable that the existing ones,
> which crash regularly. Engineering a browser in Ada is likely to produce
> a more reliable application.

You've had Mozilla 1.0 crash on you? I hasn't done that on me yet in
over a week of use. That's pretty darn good for a big program (written
in any language).

> I would like a browser/mail reader/news reader that is more secure than
> the existing ones. Engineering it in Ada would be very helpful in
> achieving that.

I've yet to hear of a security exploit in the Mozilla mail reader
(that isn't caused by embedded JavaScript anyway, and you can turn
that off).

> I would like a browser that gives the user control over what the browser
> does, not the web page author. The page may request downloading a huge
> graphic from ads.ripoff.com, but the user decides whether it does or
> not. Cookie management built in. Cache management. The ability to go
> back using the cache, not reloading the page. And so on. Writing a
> browser from scratch is one way to achieve this. If you're going to do

Downloading Mozilla is too. It gives you all that. For instance, you
can forbid loading of images from a set of websites that you specify,
turn them all off, or require your interactive permission for any
image to load. You can look at and delete your cookies at will,
disable them entirely, disable them only in mail and news, require
interactive permission from you before storing them, etc.


-- 
T.E.D. 
Home     -  mailto:dennison@telepath.com (Yahoo: Ted_Dennison)
Homepage -  (temporarily down)