Overview of the Year in Browsers 2006 by Wired

I thought I would point to a little article over at Wired: 2006: The Year in Browsers. It covers at a very high level the developments that took place this year for InternetExplorer, FireFox, Opera, Safari, Camino, Flock, Browzar. I think it's sort of telling how much browsers have become associated with security problems that it is mentioned so frequently. But in particular I find the StarWars analogy funny (he had a theme going ;) but the logic specious:

Apple Computer's Safari was relatively quiet this year, with the development team releasing only minor updates to its streamlined browser. Though it's not perfect, Safari doesn't seem to need upgrades as often as Firefox and IE — a sure sign of a well-built machine. Think of it as the Millennium Falcon of browsers.

While IE is constantly beset by attacks necessitating upgrades, and FireFox developers pride themselves on rolling out new features and fixes as soon as they possibly can, Apple limits how frequently they release patches which thus makes the number of patches less, but the time to patch longer. But I realize the article isn't all about security and thus the author is also speaking to the lack of new features which are being released, which actually could be considered somewhat of a bad thing.

But I digress. The other minor issue I had was that I don't think Browzar was so much touted as a "secure" alternative/wrapper to IE as it was a "privacy-conscious" one (even their website calls it "Your private window on the Web") . I No one was saying that the lack of a cache or history and such makes it more resistant to attacks that IE would succumb to (except some less common ones perhaps such as cookie theft). That's why the eventual finding of adware was that much more ironic ;). This quibble is probably just my own preference to not conflate "security" and "privacy" more than necessary though.

Check out the link for a quick reminder of what the year looked like, especially if you haven't heard of Flock or Browzar before.