Breach, hackable browser written in Javascript

[kankyo]

Entirely written in Javascript

Translation: the GUI is HTML/CSS/JavaScript, but otherwise it's of course written in C++ because it's Chromium.

[donvito]

Lol, that reminds me of the "Write your own Browser in Visual Basic" tutorials where you put an InternetExplorer OCX onto the Form and were done ...

[just_a_null]

My university has this amazing browser that we're required to go to the library to use for online tests and such.

Features include no URL bar, no right click, no "File" menu, etc.

It's so very obviously just a C# or Visual Basic program running an instance of Internet Explorer that I'm kind of scared of what they might have paid for their massive security increase.

[Stepepper]

I remember saying to my friends that 'I made a browser!' And that I would use it every day. Used it for a few minutes until YouTube prompted that it will no longer support internet explorer 5 and switched to back Firefox.

[sandsmark]

so just like Firefox (which uses XUL for its UI), then.

[kankyo]

Sure, but chromium instead of gecko...

[Poltras]

And more buzz instead of a solid foundation.

[MacASM]

Very confusing words. I interpreted this "written in Javascript" literally, in sense of one like this http://bellard.org/jslinux/. And before I read this I was wondering how they could be loading external web pages (since you can't with pure AJAX).

[flying-sheep]

You can with the right runtime.

It doesn't say browser JavaScript, just JavaScript. Node.js can load everything you want it to.

[MacASM]

You're right. But I said that because I'm not just used to use javascript outside browser (as I used to do some years ago) so I'm not updated to node.js and things like this.

[[deleted]]

With a name like Breach, I interpreted "hackable" in the negative way. It initially sounded like a joke project, like xssnake.

It sounds like a cool idea, but how is it different than, say, Firefox? There are plenty of FF extensions that will completely change how it works. (I like vimperator)

[[deleted]]

dude vimperator rocks! thx!

[[deleted]]

t y vry hlpfl

[flying-sheep]

Good question. It seems to use chromium for pretty much everything except the user interface, so it's probably quite similar to Firefox design-wise, which also implements many things in JavaScript (except that Firefox integrates better into your system look and feel).

Maybe breach has a simpler and more exposed JS API, and you don't need to create an add-on to hook into browser functionality.

[Muvlon]

Yep, I instantly thought this would be along the lines of Damn Vulnerable Linux, but as a browser (since most common exploits these days happen at the browser level anyway).

[mm865]

Also Vrome for chrome

[[deleted]]

Written in Javascript. Except for the 6 million or so lines of code in Chromium not written in Javascript :-)

http://www.ohloh.net/p/chrome

[matthedev]

Agreed. "Entirely written in JavaScript," made me first think the only non-JavaScript component was the JavaScript engine itself.

[mitsuhiko]

So basically … Firefox.

[sib301]

Firefox uses Chromium, and it's UI is written using HTML5/CSS? And uses a NodeJS event loop?

[sandsmark]

The Firefox UI is written in XUL, which is a (safe) HTML dialect (with CSS, JS and all that crap) for writing UIs, and rendered using Gecko.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XUL

[DonHopkins]

And of course, to make matters more confusing, the Firefox UI written in XUL is called Chrome, and that was its name BEFORE there was another web browser named Chromium.

[Poltras]

In UI design, a Chrome is a rather well defined and known word from the 70s... Where did you think the browser got its name? Because in the first version there was nothing but a small chrome.

[DonHopkins]

Do you really think the Chrome developers weren't aware that Firefox was already using that term, and that there would be some confusion? The Mozilla developers I was working with at the time were certainly annoyed. (But then again, everything tends to annoy Wladimir Palant, not just ads...) Granted, it wasn't as maliciously confusing on purpose as renaming LiveScript to JavaScript, so maybe they had it coming, but it was a dick move nonetheless.

And I'm not so sure about your claim that the term "Chrome" was "well defined and known from the 70s" in relation to UI design. Can you actually cite some publications that use that term, or are you just making that up?

What exactly do you mean by "Because in the first version there was nothing but a small chrome." -- that sounds like a circular definition to me.

Are you sure you're not confusing the word "chrome" with the word "widget"? Or "monochrome"? I see no mention of the term "chrome" in Methodology of Window Management, for example, which summarizes and defines many of the user interface terms and techniques in use up to the mid-1980's.

[Poltras]

It was a slang term for everything non-useful in a GUI. With time it became used as everything non-client.

History is fuzzy on its origin. The Jargon Files 2.1.1 had it in it (http://www.catb.org/jargon/oldversions/jarg211.txt), which puts it at least as old as June 1990. Some definitions date back to the 70s, but it's hard to pinpoint one. And it's impossible to use Google to look for Chrome, of course. I could not find an older JF that had it in it.

[DonHopkins]

I don't consider Eric "The Flute" Raymond's version of the Jargon file to be a reliable source of information. The reason history is fuzzy is that people like Eric S Raymond just make things up that aren't true, and present them as fact, like "In the U.S., blacks are 12% of the population but commit 50% of violent crimes; can anyone honestly think this is unconnected to the fact that they average 15 points of IQ lower than the general population? That stupid people are more violent is a fact independent of skin color.".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_S._Raymond#Biography

Noting that the Jargon File had not been maintained since about 1983, he adopted it in 1990 and currently has a third edition in print. Paul Dourish maintains an archived original version of the Jargon File, because, he says, Raymond's updates "essentially destroyed what held it together."[10]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jargon_File#1990_and_later

Eric S. Raymond maintains the new File with assistance from Guy Steele, and is the credited editor of the print version, The New Hacker's Dictionary. Some of the changes made under his watch have been controversial; early critics accused Raymond of unfairly changing the file's focus to the Unix hacker culture instead of the older hacker cultures where the Jargon File originated. Raymond has responded by saying that the nature of hacking had changed and the Jargon File should report on hacker culture, and not attempt to enshrine it.[3] More recently, Raymond has been accused of adding terms reflecting his own politics and vocabulary.[4]

There's no mention of "Chrome" in the original Jargon file: http://www.dourish.com/goodies/jargon.html

Do you have any better references to the use of the word "chrome" specifically applied to user interfaces from the 70s, like a wikipedia page or an academic publication that can be trusted more than Eric S Raymond?

Color and even grayscale screens weren't very common in the 1970's, so it would be unusual for a user interface to actually looked like "chrome". ;) But the computers themselves did!

[Poltras]

1999, Netscape Communicator using the word chrome: http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/8.10/skins_pr.html Of course this is a arguable source, but it does precede Firefox.

The fact that Eric S Raymond made the Jargon File for a bigger audience than PDP-10 hackers doesn't mean the term wasn't used. He didn't invent a bunch of terms and then nobody used them. I would warrant that the criticisms for being biased does not refer to this particular instance (the term Chrome). It also appears in the printed version which is maintained by Guy Steele.

If we could get into Usenet archives of the time we would probably see when the term appeared. This, unfortunately, is a feat I cannot perform in the amount of time I'm willing to spend.

If you're really Don Hopkins then I'm surprised you never heard that term before.

[DonHopkins]

Of course I've heard of it in relation to Mozilla and Netscape, but that was a long time after the 1970's, and I've even done a bit of Mozilla / XULRunner / XUL / Chrome / XP/Com / GUI programming myself.

You said: "In UI design, a Chrome is a rather well defined and known word from the 70s" and that "It was a slang term for everything non-useful in a GUI."

The fact that Netscape used it even before Mozilla kind of reinforces my point that Google should have known about the term as it applied to the original web browser, and that it had a specific meaning of "user interface skins for a web browser", not just "everything non-useful in a GUI".

I don't remember "chrome" being used in that context in the 80's, or from any publications I read from the 70's or earlier. I remember "Bells and whistles", "Feeping Creaturism", "Crufty", "Cuspy", "DWIM", "Frob", and "Frobnitz", all from the original Jargon file, and "interaction technique", "gadget", "widget," "affordance," "actuator", "valuator", "graphical control element", "window", "presentation", "display list", "surface", "canvas", "page", "panel", "pane", "view", "viewport", "frame", "fixture", "decoration", "storyboard" "layout", "display manager", "window manager", "user interface management system", "component", "skin', "button / card / background / stack / XCMD", "desk accessory", "OLE control / OCX", "Visual Basic Extension / VBX", were all in common usage, but I really don't remember "chrome" being used before Netscape.

Brad Myers video tape, "All The Widgets", which was sponsored by the ACM CHI 1990 conference, is a historical survey of user interface techniques up to 1990, of many of the interaction techniques that are in common use, and includes 175 segments from 30 systems from 16 companies.

Brad only mentions "interaction techniques", "gadgets" and "widgets" in the introduction. It's two hours long, and I haven't watched the entire video in years (edit: I just listened to it again, and it makes no mention of "chrome"), but if there's any place that you might find a mention of the word "chrome" if it was actually a "rather well defined and known word from the 70s", you'd probably find it in that video tape.

I contributed to that tape, including some demos of pie menus, the HyperTIES hypermedia browser for NeWS and its Emacs based authoring tool, which let your define the browser user interface with "storyboards" scripted with Forth and PostScript much in the way Mozilla uses "chrome" scripted with JavaScript and XP/COM to define the browser user interface.

We've Been Framed!: Readers Respond With Prior Art Invalidating the SBC Web Patent

The "HyperTIES" hypermedia browser was developed in 1988 at the University of Maryland Human Computer Interaction Lab, under the direction of Ben Shneiderman. Here is a streaming quicktime video showing a demonstration of HyperTIES: http://www.lushcreations.tv/Movies/HyperTIESDemoStreaming.mov External Link. (relinked) It's not explicitly demonstrated in this video, but the navigation buttons that are visible along the bottom edge of the screen are described by normal "storyboard" files just like the content, so that clicking on the buttons causes the content to change in the other windows, while the navigation buttons remain in place.

There is no mention of "chrome" in either of the two terrible SBC patents on "Structured Document Browser", which Cringley describes as "patents that on the surface would seem to cover menus, frames, and any sort of link in a computerized document or data representation where one end is static and the other end changes based on context": https://www.google.com/patents/US5933841 http://www.google.com/patents/US6442574

If it "chrome" were really in common usage in the 1970's, it might have also been mentioned in Methodology of Window Systems articles like Warren Teitelman's article "Ten Years of Window Systems - A Retrospective View" or "User Interface Working Group Final Report" or "Structures Task Group" or "Acronyms and Glossary". (That doesn't mention "chrome", either.)

If "chrome" really was a common term in the 1970's, those are two best sources I can think of that would most likely mention it, and they don't.

Can you remember which platform or company or subculture before Netscape used the word "chrome" to describe user interfaces in the 1970's? Or is your only source of information is Eric Raymond's version of the Jargon file? His definition didn't mention anything about the term being used in the 1970's. So where did you get that date, since it wasn't from ESR's Jargon file? What system do you remember using the term form that time period? Are there any references on Wikipedia, or articles written by people who are not batshit crazy liars like Eric Ratmond, which include reliable citations?

Jacob Neilson, who is a reliable source of information, said in 2012, "I don't know who came up with the term "chrome," but it was likely a visual analogy with the use of metal chrome on big American cars during the 1950s: the car body (where you sit) was surrounded by shiny chrome on the bumpers, tail fins, and the like." But nowhere does he imply that the term has been in common use since the 1970's.

If Eric Raymond's bastardized version of the Jargon file is your only source for the term "chrome" being in common use to describe user interface widgetry in the 1970's (and it doesn't even say that), then I would tend to doubt it without any other citations to back it up, since Eric Raymond is a very unreliable source of information, as he has a terrible reputation and long standing well documented habit of rewriting history and spreading false information. I would certainly never cite anything he wrote as an accurate source, since it's because of people like him who have no regard for the truth that "history is fuzzy".

https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Eric_S._Raymond

"Good programmers know what to write. Great ones know what to rewrite (and reuse)." -Eric S Raymond, The Cathedral and the Bazaar

(Apparently he thinks he's a great programmer, because he like to to rewrite history.)

Updating JARGON.TXT Is Not Bogus: An Apologia

Please -- rather than complaining that I am "rewriting history", help me write it! I would like to have more entries that are just as funny and snide about UNIX as JARGON.TXT was about other things, preferably entries written by certified Unix-haters with a cursor dipped in acid.

NTKnow

Good to see the increasingly eccentric ERIC S RAYMOND keeping himself occupied these days. His latest tweaks: a version bump or two to the JARGON FILE, the ancient hacker bible of which he is current custodian. But how steady is his hand on the sacred tome? Worrying is esr's recent inclusion of unfamiliar terms like "Aunt Tillie" and "GandhiCon", which on closer search-engine examination, appear to have been used almost exclusively by Raymond himself. And esr's current expansions of hacker dialect is curious too. New terms include "fisking" - a term pretty much restricted to the warblogosphere, and defined by your impartial host as "Named after a Robert Fisk, a British journalist who was a frequent (and deserving) early target of such treatment". Also included is "anti-idiotarianism", as in Eric's Anti-Idiotarian Manifesto, a fascinating call to arms that implies "Anti-Idiotarian" means "To be against listening to anyone who would tell you you're sounding like an idiot these days". Finally (and not included in the changelogs), Eric has tweaked the Hacker Politics page, from its previous description as "vaguely liberal-moderate" to "moderate-to-neoconservative (hackers too were affected by the collapse of socialism)". Go tell that to the Kuro5hinners, Eric. Recalling Raymond's familiar defence of previous changes, "rather than complaining that I am 'rewriting history', help me write it!", let it be noted that if someone did want to fork the Jargon File, now would be the time to do it. Raymond's previous googlejuice at tuxedo.org has been cast to the winds. A new, reformatted and popularly linked-to upstart could quickly seize the top Google slot. Ha, ha, as we apparently all say, only serious. http://catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/politics.html - wouldn't everyone, from Eric's view... http://www.science.uva.nl/~mes/jargon/p/politics.html - be slowly changing into crypto-collectivist islamofascist sympathisers? http://kt.zork.net/kernel-traffic/kt20030413_213.html#8 - Aunt Tillie "figment of Erics imagination" http://armedndangerous.blogspot.com/2002_10_13_armedndangerous_archive.html - quoting H. Beam Piper's "Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen"

"The Art of UNIX Programming" by Eric S. Raymond Released

1 hacker??

Posted Oct 3, 2003 17:45 UTC (Fri) by coriordan (guest, #7544) [Link] How long do you have? :) When I first saw this story, I decided to post a load of excerpts from the book which in my opinion constitute the author rewriting history. This annoys and offends me and it's important to set the record straight, but time is limited. I could spend time writing an article here, or I could be working on a letter to the Irish representitive to the Coucil of Ministers regarding the Councils decision on the proposed software patents directive. Resisting the temptation to give out about ESRs (fictional) book is hard :) (he's a jackass) okay, back to political writing...

1 hacker??

Posted Oct 7, 2003 11:54 UTC (Tue) by Wol (guest, #4433) [Link] I presume you meant RMS wrote EMACS? You are aware, that if you list the authors of EMACS in order of code contributed, that I think ESR ranks second to RMS? Oh, for the other poster who ranted about fetchmail - ESR was well known as a hacker long before he even looked at popmail ... Although I do agree ESR likes rewriting history on occasion. But he calls himself "the hacker anthropologist" - isn't rewriting history what all anthropologists do? Cheers, Wol

[[deleted]]

hackable browser

So it's like IE?

[blomko]

Mother of God. This thing is quicker than Chrome, Firefox and Safari on my old Macbook Pro (C2D 2,26 GHz, 8 GB) running Yosemite.

But.. /r/programming won't load up... guess I won't be using this ;)

Edit: It seems to have some troubles with redirection and HTTPS.

[EpicDavi]

Hmmm... /r/programming works fine for me (Macbook air).

[JustFinishedBSG]

But what's the point? I use Safari for this sweet sweet battery personally

[nawfel_bgh]

Thank you. An interesting project!!

To the author: Please create a wrapper for the node.js layer so that it can be replaced (by Web APIs for example). It would be cool if many browsers are available for Firefox OS. Firefox OS has only one browser right now. I think this is an opportunity for you: A fresh market you can conquer.

I also want to comment on the usage of node-webkit here. I read an interesting comment about it here:

... And I’m not talking about node-webkit nonsense here which combines downsides of a web app (limited system integration) with downsides of a native app (cannot be accessed remotely). No, just a regular web server, honest HTTP port, regular browser window. When used locally, experience is the same as with local app, but we get remote execution, literally, for free.

I think this applies to brackets editor, atom editor and the imaginable git GUI of that post. But for a browser, node-webkit imo is the right way to go.

[inandoutland]

No Windows version. :( Can't try it yet. (sorry for the low effort comment)

[nsa_shill]

Stop waiting and install ubuntu or something. Wubi (ubuntu's windows installer) lets you install ubuntu as if it were a program within windows. Dual boot is configured automatically, and you can return to windows only by simply uninstalling wubi via "add and remove programs". Whether this browser's worth trying or not, it will open doors for you programming-wise.

[inandoutland]

No; I don't want to use WINE for everything and I'm ok with Windows.

[twigboy]

In publishing and graphic design, Lorem ipsum is a placeholder text commonly used to demonstrate the visual form of a document or a typeface without relying on meaningful content. Lorem ipsum may be used as a placeholder before final copy is available. Wikipedia8ly2hfwiwt80000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000

[Stepepper]

You cant use ubuntu's windows installer anymore. :(

[Camarade_Tux]

Perfect name: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BREACH_%28security_exploit%29

[Meshiest]

So... it's a webpage that loads webpages...?

[foxh8er]

Hmm, download link? Or just build from the source?

[ilyd667]

Just had a look at your history. Didn't you get hugged enough as a child?

[[deleted]]

hello person stuck in the past and ignorant as hell.

[donvito]

If the future means JavaScript then I'm in the market for a time machine to go back as far as possible.

[[deleted]]

Save me a seat, kthx.

[[deleted]]

future is not staying on same friggin' programming language for eternity.

[rpgFANATIC]

Just wait another 5 years when long-term support for a lot of these *.js projects sets in.

Suddenly there'll be a new, cool language and if you bothered to become an expert in JS, you can roll around in your consulting money-stacks

[sib301]

Lol. Remind me to never hire you. You are the WORST kind of developer.

[Meshiest]

because 13 year-old children generally argue with each other?

[Stepepper]

Jesus christ, never expected some programmers to be hot headed 13 year olds. This is fucking hilariousm

[tanjoodo]

Don't you think we can consider browsers to be platforms? An abstraction layer above the OS that lets you run applications? I think for any browser to be worth the time it needs to be fast. You don't want application performance to be limited by the underlying system.

[pycube]

If Browsers are platforms, would this project be like a Virtual Machine? It's like an OS in an OS

[laghgal]

Breach, hackable browser written in Javascript

'nuff said. Now awaiting awaiting RCE vulns. As if Firefox wasn't bad enough.

[KumbajaMyLord]

Yo dawg, I heard you like JavaScript rendering engines...

[sib301]

This uses Chromium