Seamless Lessons & Security (commentary)

[Martin Dengler]

On Mon, Jul 07, 2008 at 09:40:09AM -0400, Ivan Krsti�? wrote:
> On Jul 7, 2008, at 5:52 AM, Martin Dengler wrote:
> [main point]

No response?

> >1. It's clearly academic, as in the rest of the world this
> >"launch-by-clicking-URL" behavior is about as prevalent as the common
> >cold.
> 
> It "clearly" isn't, because part of the difficulty is that we're  
> talking about code execution, which is what launch-by-click into any  
> of the execution environments (Pippy, eToys, etc) amounts to. No  
> mainstream browser supports launch-by-click for executables.

I'm conflating "launch-an-existing-app-with-input-by-clicking" with
"launch-a-downloaded-app-by-clicking", yes.  My mainstream browsers
(Firefox GNU/Linux, Firefox win32, IE win32) give me very similar, if
not the same, UI for these two situations.  So I think my point is
still a valid description of the prevalence of this behavior.

In fact, the statement

> No mainstream browser supports launch-by-click for executables.

...seems false. I just tried an IE 7.0 install I have, and it does in fact
support "launch-by-click" for executables:

http://the.earth.li/~sgtatham/putty/latest/x86/putty.exe

...yields:

http://dev.laptop.org/~mdengler/launch-by-click-ie.jpg

...so perhaps I need a different understanding of "launch-by-click" for
executables.  Please accept my apologies for wasting your/others time
if I've misunderstood.

> --
> Ivan Krstić <krstic at solarsail.hcs.harvard.edu> | http://radian.org

Martin

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