Even Firefox is not infallible

[mendhak]

I say this from the strict viewpoint of a developer who has been working with the cruddy security model that Firefox has presented to us.

While Firefox may be a wonderful tool even for developers, it reaches its limit at the point of 'standard' or 'general' development, which is about 95% of the work that any of us would ever do on it.

Over the past few weeks, I have been struggling to work with UniversalBrowserRead expanded privileges for cross-domain scripting using AJAX. In principle, there shouldn't be anything wrong with it. However, as it turns out, their expanded privileges mechanism has been very, very, very poorly implemented. But I won't go so far as to say that it hasn't been implemented, because it is very stoic in its inability to perceive any expanded privileges specifications that a developer may casually toss its way.

And it took me 6 full days to come to terms with this, as I had a preconceived notion in my head about its capabilities and implementation and I had been trying very hard to 'get it right' (until I later learned that I did get things right, *I* was right the entire time).

Don't get me wrong, I think it's a great browser and has a lot to offer to, well, YOU mostly. But it's a meagre realization that has brought me to post this here, that even firefox isn't as infallible as some of us may want you to believe. And don't get me wrong, this isn't about IE being better. It has nothing to do with which browser is better. It has everything to do with the high pedestal that we place our favorite products on. I'm sure most of you won't be delving into the realm that I have just been in, it's not very likely, nor is it very common, but it's just a point I'm trying to make.

Anyways, my fondness for firefox has not been diminished, only my respect has. Just a little.

Thank you for taking the time out to read this rant. If you are going to reply, please do not reply with any "XYZ is better than DEF" type statements, or questions about what the problem was specifically.

[Dave Sell]

This begs the question - did IE implement these privilege features to your standards?

[mendhak]

Yes, it has, but in a different way. The implementation will work perfectly, but only after the user allows it to run.

[penagate]

Did you Bugzilla it?