Chrome Browser Team Did Not Disassemble Microsoft Vista

“Seriously…we didn’t disassemble Vista….”

In his special report for ZDNet, Stephen Shankland, writes that even though comments in Chromium (open source code for Chrome) indicate otherwise, Google denies disassembling Window’s Vista to get the “Data Execution Prevention” security code to work in Chrome.

That’s good news for Google, because had they indeed followed their own suggestion to disassemble Vista’s kernal32.dll file to understand how the security code works, they would have been in violation of Vista’s EULA.

Google says “We did not disassemble this code” in one statement, but then shows their support for using the technique saying “Disassembling is a common and accepted practice in software development, frequently used to make sure software features are compatible with other software programs or operating systems”.

To me it sounds like someone did disassemble the code and put the comment in Chromium before the Google legal and PR team knew it.

The net result is “who cares”. I doubt there was evil intent behind it and besides, I’m guessing Microsoft has probably done the same once or twice in it’s 30 year history. I bet the same goes for Mozilla developers too.

To see Stephen Shankland’s full report, go here.