Simon Willison’s Weblog

Mibbit (via) Excellent web-based IRC client, should be great for when pesky firewalls get in the way. Also a good candidate for use with a site-specific browser.

# 19th April 2008, 3:53 pm / ajax, irc, mibbit, sitespecificbrowsers

Major Update to Prism (via) Mozilla’s site-specific browser tool can now use separate profiles (and hence separate cookie jars) for each instance, making it an excellent tool for protecting yourself against CSRF vulnerabilities in the web applications you rely on.

# 10th March 2008, 2:03 pm / csrf, prism, mozilla, sitespecificbrowsers, cookies

Fluid. Another site-specific browser toolkit for OS X (Leopard only), from Todd Ditchendorf. Again, it’s not clear if this does the Right Thing and creates separate cookie jars for every application.

# 28th December 2007, 11:42 pm / fluid, cookies, sitespecificbrowsers, toddditchendorf, osx, leopard

Mailplane (via) A commercial OS X Gmail client built around a site-specific browser.

# 25th October 2007, 7:57 am / gmail, google, sitespecificbrowsers, osx, mail, mailplane, chris-messina

Site-specific browsers and GreaseKit. New site-specific browser tool which lets you include a bunch of Greasemonkey scripts. For me, the killer feature of site-specific browsers is still cookie isolation (to minimise the impact of XSS and CSRF holes) but none of the current batch of tools advertise this as a feature, and most seem to want to share the system-wide cookie jar.

# 25th October 2007, 7:56 am / greasekit, csrf, javascript, greasemonkey, cookies, safari, security, sitespecificbrowsers, webkit, xss, chris-messina

WebRunner 0.7—New and Improved. A simple application for running a site-specific browser for a service (e.g. Twitter, Gmail etc). This is a great idea: it isolates your other browser windows from crashes and also isolates your cookies, helping guard against CSRF attacks.

# 27th September 2007, 1:55 pm / webrunner, security, csrf, browsers, twitter, gmail, xulrunner, sitespecificbrowsers