Mozilla rebuts Firefox 2 bug reports

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Yes and no

The process used to browse the internet on Windows is 100% in user mode. You can kill the iexplore.exe process from within Task Manager, and it will end your browse session, but it won't affect any other part of the system. Even if IE crashes it does not affect any other part of the system.

That does not mean that any other part of the OS does not use the same libraries that IE uses. It does. It is just that you could have different processes using the same DLLs, but those processes are isolated from each other just as much as two completely different apps would be, using different DLLs. For instance, if I run two instances of IE, one as admin, the other as a non-admin user, then if the non-admin version gets compromised due to some flaw, the flaw is still isolated to the non-admin user (unless it is a privilege escalation flaw, but that is another story).

The problem is that if you discover a flaw in IE, it is likely that the same flaw exists in the rendering components that the OS use (since it really is the same thing). It is a find-it-in-the-browser, find-it-in-the-OS kind of situation. That is the bad part. The good part is that it is still different processes with the same process/security isolation between them you would get with any other two processes.

Posted by: Qbt   Posted on: 10/26/06 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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