Yes Kelly, I remember Portals. They were all the rage for a while.
Oracle dove into the Portal thing in a big way, then screwed their user base by not including reverse compatibility from 8 to 9i.
More about Chrome.
An interesting revelation has emerged about the inner workings of Chrome and there is reason to believe that parts of it were developed by reverse engineering Windows. As it happens, reverse engineering of any part of Windows is expressly prohibited by the EULA.
It is unlikely MS will take any action on this as there are potential issues MS would rather not delve into.
Chrome is open source. This means that anyone can obtain and view the source code of the application before being compiled.
Naturally, many developers outside Google have been poring over the code to see what makes it tick.
It is common practice for developers to leave comments in the code that explain what is going on. Such comments are preceded with special characters that tell the compiler to ignore what follows and skip on to the next line of code.
The part of Chrome that may be a result of reverse engineering has to do with Chrome’s ability to perform what is called Data Execution Prevention (DEP). This is a security measure that prevents malicious individuals from using an exploit known as a buffer overflow. I’ll not go into the details of what that is or how it is used to do nasty things. Suffice it to say that DEP is a good thing and it is great that Chrome supports it.
Implementing DEP is not exactly straightforward and to get it working in all cases is something that is only supported starting with Windows Vista SP1 and Server 2008. It is also thought to be implemented in XP SP3.
This implementation is as yet "undocumented", meaning that anyone outside MS will have a tough time getting it working as they are not really sure how to code things to make uses of the feature. The observant reader will now rag on MS for not releasing documentation to that API call and you will get little argument from me.
So this is why Google likely reversed engineered Windows. They wanted to provide this added security and were unwilling to wait for the mighty MS to get around to releasing the much valued information.
So here are the comments that seem to point to the reverse engineering.
// Try documented ways first.
// Only available on Vista SP1 and Windows 2008.
There are some lines of code, and then we find.
// Go in darker areas.
// Only available on Windows XP SP2 and Windows Server 2003 SP1.
// http://www.uninformed.org/?v=2&a=4
But here is the real kicker.
// Completely undocumented from Microsoft. You can find this information by
// disassembling Vista's SP1 kernel32.dll with your favorite disassembler.
If you’d like to read all the nitty gritty, you can
see for yourself from the one attributed with first discovering this and pointing it out to the world.
Another major difference of Chrome from other Browsers such as Firefox, IE7, Opera and Safari has to do with "processes". The old Browsers do everything via a single process. This one process displays the User Interface, parses the HTML and renders it within a Window or Tab. It also runs any plug-ins you have installed. This is true for all the Tabs you may be using. It is all done via a single process.
If any one thing crashes, it brings down the Browser. So if one web site has goofed up code and it locks things up, POOF!, your Browser is now crashed and you loose anything you might have been doing in the other tabs.
Chrome launches separate process for each Tab. So if one site goofs up, it will only kill that one Tab.
MS has been moving toward this with IE7 and completes the transition with IE8.
I am only skimming the surface of all this.
The point I guess is that Chrome and IE8 are major departures from the way standard Web Browsers have worked in the past and offer a much higher degree of stability and security. They leave all others in the dust in this regard and it will be interesting to see when Firefox catches up.
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