--On 14 December 2005 06:38 -0800, J.C. Roberts wrote:
Even VMware supports only one architecture for their "player" (x86-32)
They do actually support x86-64 on the player (I'm not sure if this changed recently - 'player' is out of beta as of a day or two ago).
and only two possible host operating systems on that architecture (linux and ms-windows).
Yes, this is a pity, but not entirely unexpected.
You may also want to realize that no attempted isolation is perfect. There are ways for attackers to break out of jails/chroots and similar is true for virtual machines. By using such methods you've only added a _layer_ of security which only stops _some_ (possibly many) attackers. It's not completely bullet proof (nothing is) but it does help.
You only need to break the 'browser appliance' OS to send traffic on the LAN/internet, and the regular environment provided by the standardized VM could make this easier. It does make it significantly harder to access personal data stored outside the VM though (compared with browsing directly on the same machine as the personal data).
