[cap-talk] Why arn't safer OS being used. [ was Confessions of a C programmer]

[Karp, Alan H]

David Wagner wrote:
> My impression is that
> there are lots of apps out there that do all sorts of crazy things,
> but I couldn't characterize exactly what they do and thus wouldn't
> be in a position to evaluate claims of backwards compatibility.

Boy, do they ever!  We learned that lesson with Polaris.  Fortunately, the awful user interfaces in the most widely used products have trained people to be adaptable.  Since it's only a prototype, Polaris implements about 95% of the most commonly used features of many applications.  I believe that fewer applications break completely under Polaris than under Vista with UAC.  

When people encounter a feature not supported by Polaris, they find a workaround and keep on going.  One example is the list of recently used files in the File menu.  We didn't implement a powerbox for this list, so users can't open files that way.  They quickly switched to using the Recent Items list from the Start menu.  

The lesson is that we don't need 100% compatibility on day one, although the closer we come, the larger the audience.  I believe that we will find ways to implement most of the missing features.  Eventually, developers may evolve their applications to make that easier to do, if only to avoid the bad press from yet another successful attack.

________________________
Alan Karp
Principal Scientist
Virus Safe Computing Initiative
Hewlett-Packard Laboratories
1501 Page Mill Road
Palo Alto, CA 94304
(650) 857-3967, fax (650) 857-7029
http://www.hpl.hp.com/personal/Alan_Karp