Firefox

[pbrennick]

HuMaX,
Intensive testing is a luxury we can't always afford.  I am sure I speak for many when I say that we are looking forward to your results!  Please be sure to tell us.

Paul

[Bieb]

I used to run spyware/adware checkers every few weeks, and they always found hundreds of problems.  I installed Firefox, and then kind of forgot to run them for a couple of months.  Just the other day, I tried it again.  3 objects found by Spybot S&D, 7 by Adaware, and none of them really dangerous, all just visitor tracking systems.  So, yeah, I think it's pretty safe to say that Firefox is less prone to spyware/adware.

[Phil]

I fear Microsoft is under a lot of pressure to deliver what their corporate market wants. That's secure servers that have the ability to protect precious marketing data that they collect from vulnerable clients who 'trust' all of our modern technology a little more than they should. I was impressed, however, that MS recently acquired the Giant anti-spyware company and does seem to be doing their best to make the 'protection' available to Genuine Windows clients. I had played with their beta-release and was suprised to see that it found components of Ad-Ware that were labeled as problematic. To me, it seems like MS will continue to build bigger and more fault tolerant systems with more and more features and, yet, bigger holes. It makes sense: Bigger Holes need more Patching that translates into More Business! If they leave many of the Holes in the products they ship and add a new one or two with each release their big corporate clients will love them because to them it means more customer data is available. It's good for MS too because they now own one of the companies that Patches the Holes and they can certainly show that they are doing their best to address the issues! Unfortunately, sometimes your best just isn't quite good enough for the real world ... and that's one of the reasons why I really like to see a lot of movement toward the availability of source code that will be reviewed by experts, both the professionals and the merely curious.

[hutch--]

Interconnectivity in computers is like promiscuity among people, the more you spread it around, the more you catch. No wowserism is intended here but the mechanism is much the same and the solution is much the same, if you don't want to catch everything that is going around, don't spread it around.

Now it the normal sense with computers, if you want to have the capacity to log onto a site that will format your hard disk for you, install an operating system, censure your rights on digital media, do automatic upgrades for you, report you to the FBI if you don't vote for a particular political party etc ... fine if you are silly enough but the cost is that someone else will find out how it works and with that access to your computer, they can make a mess of it.

The trade here is security for interconnectivity and the solution if security maters to you is to limit what can be done remotely and know what you are doing when you download something that is supposed to update your system. Most know from past experience that PCANYWHERE meant PCANYONE as the protocols can be learnt by others for that form of access. The old rule is trust NOTHING and be aware of what you ae doing with a computer.

Trusting an OS vendor or software company may put money in their pockets but if they can sell you something that leaks like a sieve, they will and you are the "suck" that is stuck with the problem after.

[Ghirai]

HuMaX, security through obscurity is bad practice :naughty:

[Mark Jones]

Really Ghirai? Then what is the best method to increase security? Release a new version every few weeks? :bdg

p.s. did you know that in FireFox you can go back/forward with SHIFT-MOUSEWHEEL? :wink

[MazeGen]

p.s. did you know that in FireFox you can go back/forward with SHIFT-MOUSEWHEEL? :wink

:eek Wow, nice!  :toothy

[Bieb]

So install mouse gestures and go back and forth with right-left click and the reverse...

[pbrennick]

With K-Melion, you can go back/forward with ALT-MOUSEWHEEL.  Couldn't resist, it is a neat feature.

Paul

[Robert Collins]

Why don'y you just click on the Back/Forward buttons on the tool bar? How simple can you get?

[Mark Jones]

uggghh...

too...
tired...
to..
reach...
all the way..
up...
there....
:bg

[Robert Collins]

uggghh...

too...
tired...
to..
reach...
all the way..
up...
there....
:bg

Ummmmmm...........maybe you have tired blood.....need vitamins

[sba4rmbm]

Despite the illusion that Firefox is much safer than MSIE, it seems that this is simply not so; take a look, for example, at:

http://www.informationweek.com/story/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=160900911

And despite the illusion that Firefox is more conformant to HTML and CSS standards than MSIE, I can say as the webmaster of a large site in Hebrew that Firefox and all standard versions of Mozilla do not properly support HTML 4 or CSS for the right-to-left languages used by about 1,000,000,000 people.  Pretty pathetic.  On the other hand, even the now ancient MSIE 5 did render all these pages perfectly and MSIE6 still does.

Thousands of my pages that are veriffied to meet HTML 4 standards of W3C are simply UNREADABLE in Firefile (not just ugly, but UNREADABLE!); the ones that are readable in Firefox are mostly ugly.

In other words, Firefox is 5 to 7 years behind MSIE in the supprot of right-to-left languages used by ONE BILLION people!  So let us not fool ourselves.

There are several TABBED browser frontends for MSIE, and I use AM Browsers myself:

http://www.ambrowser.com/

It works fine for Hebrew, Arabic, Farsi, and other "backwards" languages and also for English and other left-to-right languages that most of you use.

[Mark Jones]

I had to reinstall Windows XP the other day after a HDD crashed. (Previous system uptime was like two months.) How can you explain 2 trojan infections, 13 spyware cookies, 1 RAT tool, and 2 auto-download bots just from windows update and other driver updates?

As usual, after I cleaned all the trash out and installed FireFox, I have not had a SINGLE infection since. FireFox is EONS better than IE at security, hands-down. Anyone who disagrees is simply misinformed, biased, or jealous.

IE doesn't suck, it just has many more holes than FireFox does. I'm not sure about the "less common languages" you cite, but in my experience, FF (with windows' east-Asian language support installed) displays Japanese top-to-bottom perfectly and handles the codepage settings transparently as well. Not a small feat by any means.

Do you work for Microsoft?

[MichaelW]

Having more problems with IE does not necessarily indicate that that it has more holes, just that the ratio (as*holes hammering on it) / (holes in it) is higher. I think having a good firewall running whenever you are connected would stop most or all of these problems. I run IE exclusively, and the only problem like this I have ever had was when I connected so I could update a pre-SP1 Windows 2000 Pro, without first protecting it with a firewall. After I reinstalled and repeated the process with a firewall, I had no problems.