A Blog From Behind the Trenches

The other day, Microsoft decided to speak out against WebGL. It's harmful to the web, they said.

To be more specific, they are worried about security.

Microsoft's position is not entirely unreasonable. There are always possible security concerns with new technologies. It is important to highlight these, and fix any problems (such as the recent WebGL vulnerability in Firefox).

But since when did a security flaw mean that we throw the entire piece of technology out? Operating systems and web browsers have been dealing with security problems for many years. It's not like this is new to Microsoft, so their criticism sounds more like FUD than anything else.

Indeed, Microsoft's criticism would sound a little less hollow if they weren't doing the exact same thing with Silverlight that they are criticizing WebGL over.

And lo and behold, a Denial of Service vulnerability in Silverlight 5 of the same type that Microsoft was overly concerned about with WebGL recently surfaced.

I'll quote the report here:

Recently Microsoft published an article about a WebGL DOS vulnerability:
http://blogs.technet.com/b/srd/archive/2011/06/16/webgl-considered-harmful.aspx

The same vulnerability exists in Silverlight 5, here's a proof of concept (warning, crashes your system)
http://people.mozilla.org/~bjacob/SilverLight5DOSJustLikeWebGL/HelloWorld3D/Bin/Debug/HelloWorld3DTestPage.html

Normally I wouldn't file a Silverlight bug report about that since this really isn't specific to Silverlight (or WebGL, or any particular 3D API), but the above-mentioned Microsoft security article suggests that Microsoft thought that it would be WebGL-specific.

Ouch.

Double ouch.

To be clear, WebGL doesn't allow you to simply pass things directly to the driver. The browser "compiles" the source before it reaches the OpenGL (or Direct3D) driver. This seems to be similar to what Silverlight is doing. Even Flash 11 will be doing these things.

So when it all comes down to it, Microsoft looked at a problem, wrote a text on it, and made it sound like it was specific to WebGL. But the problem also exists in other 3D APIs, and yet Microsoft seems to think that WebGL is "harmful to the web" while Silverlight isn't?

Even people at Microsoft do not buy it. That's how convincing their "WebGL Considered Harmful" article is.

So, Microsoft, does this mean you are going to kill 3D support in Silverlight, or does it mean you will add WebGL support to Internet Explorer?

A little consistency would be nice, you know?

Opera Software's Annual Report for 2010 is now available.

While this report is primarily aimed at investors, it is useful reading for anyone who wants a more in-depth view of Opera. It contains raw numbers, detailed information about Opera's business models, and more. There's even some more detailed information on the acquisition of AdMarvel and FastMail.

I have added some "highlights" from the report, but bear in mind that I had to keep it somewhat brief (even though it's a fairly long list). For the full details, please read the actual report.

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When Opera Web Mail was in the process of being migrated from IBM to our servers, I briefly mentioned a new webmail service where you would be able to use your My Opera username and password to log in.

Today, the new service was unveiled.

Named My Opera Mail, it gives you a free @myopera.com e-mail address, 1 GB of storage (as a start), and allows you to log in at mail.opera.com with your regular My Opera username.

Keep in mind that the service is still in beta, but you already get full access to IMAP (incoming) and SMTP (outgoing) if you want to use it from your e-mail client (such as the one that's build into Opera for desktop).

Best of all: It's completely free!

Log in to the service right now, and then head over to the Mail Team blog to learn more and share your feedback!

While browsing GetJar, I came across this. I'm not exactly sure what's going on, but I found it somewhat amusing. It might be related to some recent developments

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A BBC blogger reports that Microsoft has filed an antitrust complaint against Google in the EU.

It's an informative article, but it doesn't get all its facts right. It claims that this is Microsoft's first antitrust filing against Google, which is not correct. In fact, I reported on antitrust filings by Microsoft against Google in both the US and EU back in 2007.

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As many have noticed, the size of Opera Mobile for Android is more than 20 MB. But did you know that the real size is actually around 10 MB?

How can that be?

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Did you know that James Randi most likely has viking blood flowing through his veins, or did you ever wonder what kind of computer he uses? Wonder no more.

The background for this is that James Randi is currently holding a series of talks in Norway in connection with a campaign by the Norwegian Humanist Association called "no one likes to be fooled".

There is a growing commercial market of "alternative" thoughts, ideas, products and services that all claim to solve all sorts of problems, but often with a severe lack of actual facts to back up their claims. The campaign aims to encourage critical thinking, so that you can avoid being fooled by people trying to get to your money by making unverifiable claims.

James Randi is often referred to as a "professional skeptic" due to his many years of actively revealing the truth behind seemingly miraculous events and claims. Even so, he is open to being wrong, and there is a million dollar prize waiting for someone to cash it in by showing actual evidence of paranormal, supernatural, or occult activities.

I was fortunate enough to be able to meet with Randi at his hotel a couple of days after attending his talk in Oslo.

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Week 12 has started, so here are some of the things that happened in week 11:

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Sometimes, being on the bleeding edge, and being the first to support interesting new web technologies, causes problems.

A couple of days ago, we released an Android build with support for the HTML5 <device> element. This gives you access to the phone's camera, which opens up new possibilities on the web, such as video conferencing. Our guys had been working on this for a while, and I guess they were looking forward to seeing what people would be able to do with it.

But that very same day, the decision was made to remove the <device> element from the HTML5 specification, and replace it with a JavaScript API.

The good news is that we can probably reuse quite a bit of what we did to support <device>. From what I hear, the Opera guys involved with HTML5 actually welcomed the change as well.

But this shows that being on the bleeding edge isn't always easy. Things can change quickly in the world of technology!

eWeek and other sites are making a big deal out of the new Bing browser toolbar allegedly copying features from social browser/Flock clone RockMelt.

Frankly, I don't get it.

Browsers have been copying each other since the dawn of time, and the press didn't seem to care much. Things like Speed Dial, popup blocking, full page zoom, sessions, private data deletion, and so on, were invented or pioneered by Opera, and are in use by other browsers today. Opera has also added features that were first seen in other browsers, such as private browsing and extensions.

Why do they care about this only now?

And as far as I can tell, the ideas in RockMelt aren't exactly novel, new or revolutionary either. Remember Flock?