The Tangled Web

Part III. A Glimpse of Things to Come

Following nearly a decade of stagnation, the world of browsers is once more a raging battlefield. In a manner all too reminiscent of the First Browser Wars in the late 1990s, vendors compete by bringing new features to market monthly. The main difference is that security is now seen as a clear selling point.

Of course, objectively measuring the robustness of any sufficiently complex piece of software is an unsolved problem in computing, doubly so if your codebase happens to carry almost two decades worth of bloat. Therefore, much of the competitive effort goes into inventing and then rapidly deploying new security-themed additions, often with little consideration for how well they actually solve the problem ...