Microsoft, Mozilla, Opera and Konqueror Hold Security Summit

[tedster]

Development team members from Opera, Microsoft, Mozilla and Konqueror met in Toronto last week to tackle the pressing mutual problem of secure certificates. This was a real working session, and intentionally was not a publicity grab in any way.

I hope we see more at this level of cooperation.

The onus for end-user security increasingly rests on the browser vendors. After all, it's our products that stand between the scammers and the scammed.

We can compete over so many aspects of our products, but security at this level requires cooperation and collaboration. And by sitting down at the same table, we have done more to enhance the security of the Internet than we could competing alone.

[opera.com...]

[dillonstars]

Slightly off topic I know, but it would be great to see this level of cooperation going on in other areas like CSS rendering and other standards... However I do applaud this start.

[encyclo]

It is a great initiative by the Konqueror development team, and the promise of better cross-browser consistency regarding secure certificates can only be good news. From reading the Konqueror team's report it is clear that the system demonstrated by Microsoft in the IE7 beta has attracted a lot of praise: with the address bar showing green for safe, red for unsafe and the padlock and certificate details much more visible and accessible from the address bar rather than the toolbar. Konqueror are going to adopt the scheme in KDE 4.0 and others are likely to follow.

The only surprise I had on reading this is that it does not appear that Apple's Safari team were invited - that browser is by far the strongest on th eMac platform nowadays, and it would be good to see a de-facto standard adopted not just for Windows and Linux/Unix but for Mac OSX too.

[LeChuck]

Re:CSS etc

They should just standardize on Gecko, then slap their own GUI on top of it if they have to. That would be nice. :)

And Safari is mostly KHTML, aka Konqueror. Anything useful Konqueror does trickles down into Safari too.

[Naelphin]

Although KHTML and WebKit (Safari) started the same, they've substantially different systems now. Apple uses extensive use of OSX only APIs, which means that the KHTML people need to implement large chunks of code before they can use it.