[cap-talk] Whether principals' authority can increase

[David-Sarah Hopwood]

David Wagner wrote:
> Marcus Brinkmann wrote:
>> [design challenge:] The FireFox browser asks the user in
>> a dialog if it wants to import bookmarks from Internet Explorer.  The
>> user authorizes the action, but the powerbox does not know that this
>> authorizing action occured and needs to ask for confirmation.
> 
> Rob Meijer wrote:
>> * User -> IE : Give me a handle to my bookmarks that I can delegate.
>> * User -> Firefox : Here is a handle to my bookmarks, use it.
>>
>> It are both still two actions, but two distinct actions, no duplication of
> 
> This requires IE to cooperate by providing this functionality.
> But what incentive would IE have to make it easy to switch to another
> browser?

There is actually quite strong public pressure on the browser vendors to
"play nicely". IE does an provide 'Export Bookmarks' option which saves
the bookmarks in a de-facto standard, HTML-based format (actually the
'bookmarks.htm' format originally defined by Netscape). It turns out
that this export feature is needed even to transfer bookmarks between
copies of IE running on different versions of Windows -- see
<http://support.microsoft.com/kb/211089>.

Anyway, in an earlier post I suggested a solution to your design challenge
that doesn't require two steps (and works for many other things besides
bookmarks). That solution does require each browser to register its
bookmarks as a data source, but it would be trivial to add that
functionality in any hypothetical port of the browser to a capability-
based OS or environment.

-- 
David-Sarah Hopwood