June 1997
Intermediate to advanced
506 pages
14h 29m
English
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Chapter 2. The Buggy Browser: Evolution of Risk
Web browsers are extremely complex pieces of software that seem to be getting more complex all the time. Every time new features are added, there are more chances for something to go wrong. That’s good news for crooks and attackers and bad news for people interested in web security. Most security bugs are fundamentally programming bugs.
Fortunately, by understanding the real risks of browsers, it is possible to manage many of their associated risks.
Browser History
The first web browsers were developed by scientists at CERN for publishing papers about high-energy particle physics. These early browsers could display web pages containing text and links to other pages of text. The pages were created with a WYSIWYG (What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get) editor written for NeXT computers and stored in HTML files.
Mosaic 2.0, the browser created at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, introduced the ability to display forms and simple widgets, with text fields, push buttons, radio buttons, and pull-down menus. Combined with CGI (Common Gateway Interface), forms and widgets gave web programmers a kind of generic user interface. It was simple: Display a form, have the user fill in some fields, press a button, and display a new form with new fields to be filled in.
The Return of Block Mode
There was nothing fundamentally new about the web’s style of computing: IBM computers were doing it in the 1970s on 3270 terminals. Called "block ...
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.