torkell | (Reply)

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It's something of an architectural design decision, in that the others (Firefox, Opera, Chrome - not tried Safari) have a model of one process for a given profile (Chrome has multiple processes but I believe will still only have one control/interface process for a profile). IE6 on the other hand will let you run as many processes as you like, and temporary state (e.g. session cookies) is not shared among processes. A nice side-effect of having multiple processes with distinct session state is a whole class of security holes just evaporate - assuming you log into your bank's site from within another process, and they use session cookies, then it's impossible for a site running in a different process to hijack that session. There are some problems involved with implememting this though - one I can think of is your on-disk data now needs to be multiprocess safe (without it you only need it to be threadsafe, which is easier).

You make a good point about the interface, Opera is definetely more customisable that IE6 and has
actually useful shinyness. I've not used the gestures, but I do like its tab ordering system and the single-key shortcuts. If it weren't for the multi-process issue and a couple of bugs, I would have likely switched to Opera by now.

I was thinking also of system integration as a whole when I said IE6. I have an address bar to the bottom of my screen (to get it right-click on the taskbar, Toolbars, Address... except Microsoft partially removed it in a service pack because some regulator didn't like it - that's another rant), and it behaves like a cross between the IE address bar and the Run dialog. The integration is excellent - I can type in a website, a folder on my computer, a network share, a program, a file, the name of a favourite, or a search keyword, and it all works with full auto-complete and launches the right thing. On the one hand, that kind of integration is monopolistic... on the other hand, it's incredibly useful (and I believe it will launch the default browser, so if you've set Opera as the default it'll use that).