Comment by scarejunba
6 years ago
Holy Jesus. Those things were chock full of security holes. If you used a web browser that arrived on a CD ROM you'd be advertising massive pwnability.
In fact, you could easily simulate this by using last year's Firefox.
Firefox, chrome, linux ... all are full of unnecessary complexity. The point being - we need daily patches to keep it from falling apart.
I have links (or lynx) on an old SuSE, maybe even a Mandriva CD. Would they be massively pwnable?
Hard to say, but not necessarily a great example; exploits on software are a function both of attack surface / complexity and installed userbase (i.e. nobody bothers to see if lynx is pwnable because a zero-day against that browser will be worth, what, twenty bucks to gain access to the five people who use it?).
Perhaps. Perhaps not. As a thought experiment:
How long would it be safe to go without browser updates with a browser of complexity/capabilies of links, if 50% of people used it?
With many people combing through it, would it become effectively unexploitable?
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