On Mon, 7 Mar 2011, Yannick Duchêne (Hibou57) wrote:

> I'm afraid nobody would care. What made FireFox popular among 
> self-so-called “geeks”, was plugins (Mozilla get a lot of free advertising 
> via buzzes generated by the plugins/addons fever). Just a very few little 
> people are interested in application source, even more true with a 
> browser. What matters is (ordered by relevancy): 1) is it free to download 
> ? 2) will this play YouTube and DailyMotion medias fine ? 3) Will this 
> help me to look “geeky” or “fashioned” in others eyes ?

You are probably right but some sort of ultra reliable browser might be of 
itnerest to certain niche markets. I've had a few problems interacting with 
my bank due to browser quirks (JavaScript incompatibilities?) and that 
didn't give me a warm and fuzzy feeling. Of course the first step in 
creating such a browser would probably be to ban plugins and maybe even to 
ban JavaScript. I'm sure that wouldn't be popular among casual users (which 
includes myself most of the time).

Peter

> P.S.2. If JavaScript appeared to be unsafe, this was primarily because it 
> was a first target to attack. I am not sure even SPARK would be enough to 
> prevent all troubles when so much energy is dedicated to break security 
> (that's not just a matter of things like buffer overflows or out-of-range 
> values).

One could perhaps implement a JavaScript with extra run time checking at the 
JavaScript language level. I really don't know. Of course it would run more 
slowly.