As you might remember Martin McKey very generously offered his readers the chance to post questions which he will ask at the IE7 release party. Well, he went he asked and as I’ve predicted he got a canned response. I felt that this was partially he didn’t insist on it – and I can’t blame him because they had a lot of questions to ask and after all it wasn’t his question – and probably partially because I didn’t phrase the question clear enough (English not being my native language). Actually I suspect that event if he would have insisted he would have got some generic response. So here my question again and I challenge any IE7 technical team member to give me a technical reason (like we couldn’t do X with the current set of APIs) for not implementing the containment wall
technology in pre-Vista Windows versions. As I understand it this technology is basically separating IE in multiple processes with each process a specific task (like rendering the page, talking to the net, etc) and each process drops the rights it doesn’t need, meaning that if you find a bug in the rendering code for example, you can’t exploit it in any meaningful because when you execute code in the context of the rendering process, you have almost zero privileges. If this is truly what this technology does, this is entirely possible with current versions of Windows, and I see no reason other than marketing for this move. (Actually I’m not deluding myself into thinking that anybody or anybody from Microsoft for that matter reads my blog, but it’s nice to let some steam out 😉 ).
2 responses to “The IE7 team replies – sort of”
CDMan,
You’re right, I didn’t insist on a technical answer for your question, and in fact I didn’t ask the question in its entirety due to lack of time. I’ve come to expect these types of answers, which is a failure on my part. I’m not a reporter, I’m a guy who blogs and podcast and has gotten lucky enough to get invited to some of these events. I’m starting to get over the initial shock of it and will be asking harder questions in the future. Keep giving me feedback and keep me improving.
Martin
Ps. I suspect the beers before the recording session were specifically designed to soften us up.
Hope my comment didn’t come out too negative. I too was expecting an answer along the same lines and I’m pretty sure that event if you would have asked the question more technically they would have just dodged it and would have taken a fair amount of insistence to get something usable (if possible at all).
Keep up the good work and I hope that we can help each other out.
Ps. Beer = Good 🙂