Dav Posted December 16, 2008 Report Posted December 16, 2008 http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7784908.stm[/url] ]Users of Microsoft's Internet Explorer are being urged by experts to switch to a rival until a serious security flaw has been fixed
Samapico Posted December 16, 2008 Report Posted December 16, 2008 "Every browser is susceptible to vulnerabilities from time to time. It's fine to say 'don't use Internet Explorer' for now, but other browsers may well find themselves in a similar situation," he added.I have to agree with the guy on this... Hackers find vulnerabilities in IE because they search for it. There would be no use to search vulnerabilities in a browser used by only 10 or 20% of the population. Plus, these people are usually a bit more "skilled" with computers so they're more likely to have an antivirus and not divulge too many information... It's just like people who say Windows sucks because of all the viruses...
tcsoccerman Posted December 16, 2008 Report Posted December 16, 2008 I didn't read the link, but on topic with the post title, i'm starting to not like Firefox. Firefox, when it started, was meant to be a simple, leightweight browser. That was the reason i switched to it from internet explorer in the first place, with my slow computer (intel celeron) and little ram (256mb). Now it seems that firefox is the bulkiest, ram gargling browser out there. Now i use chrome. Why do i need different themes? Why do i need a text box for adresses, and one for searches (google chrome combines them). I have yet to try opera and safari, will probably happen when i get bored with chrome and or decide to test my sites on them (there still being built).
Drake7707 Posted December 16, 2008 Report Posted December 16, 2008 I'm using opera at the moment, it responds a lot faster than firefox or ie does. But it has some annoyances such as sites that aren't supported, mouse gestures that sometimes annoy me, some crashes (rarely but annoying).
Cancer+ Posted December 17, 2008 Report Posted December 17, 2008 "At present, this exploit only seems to affect 0.02% of internet sites," ROFL. What is that...like ONE site? Give me a break. Sounds like Mr. Ferguson got paid off. You know how many people Microsoft has hired TRYING to hack their shit for the sole purpose of putting out patches. And I also like how they didn't put out any specifics. It just says "this attack steals usernames and passwords." Half of malware, spyware, viruses do that. I actually had some old lady come into my work today asking about that. Well I'm sure it made her switch to Firefox. Any dumb person who doesn't know anything about computers will see that and go OMG, NOT MY PASSWORD. IM FINDING ANOTHER BROWSER. IE is fine.
FMBI Posted December 17, 2008 Report Posted December 17, 2008 "Every browser is susceptible to vulnerabilities from time to time. It's fine to say 'don't use Internet Explorer' for now, but other browsers may well find themselves in a similar situation," he added.I have to agree with the guy on this... Hackers find vulnerabilities in IE because they search for it. There would be no use to search vulnerabilities in a browser used by only 10 or 20% of the population. Plus, these people are usually a bit more "skilled" with computers so they're more likely to have an antivirus and not divulge too many information... It's just like people who say Windows sucks because of all the viruses... To some degree that's true, but IE also has one of of the most incompetent support teams in the tech world. Every month you hear of a massive new vulnerability that could affect hundreds of thousands of users if it isn't fixed quickly - and the vast majority of the exploits/bugs are found by "good" hackers, not by Microsoft. If FireFox or the other alternative browsers had half as many problems as IE, they'd have been wiped out years ago.
Samapico Posted December 17, 2008 Report Posted December 17, 2008 "At present, this exploit only seems to affect 0.02% of internet sites,"ROFL. What is that...like ONE site? Give me a break. Sounds like Mr. Ferguson got paid off.Actually.... that's 2/10000 sites... in February 2007, the Netcraft Web Server Survey found 108,810,358 distinct websites 21762,0716 21000 sites... That looks like a lot of sites to me
»Lynx Posted December 17, 2008 Report Posted December 17, 2008 It's not surprising that people may still think that IE is fine, even though it is one of the lower scoring browsers available. Take IE 8, ['out of the box'] it scores a measly 12/100 on the Acid3 test (http://acid3.acidtests.org/) - and generally speaking isn't a very secure browser, either (At least for passwords, which has been mentioned, albeit off topic, in this thread). If you really want to be secure with your passwords, don't be a lazy bastard - and remember them. Once you've done that, type them in instead of relying on your computer to insert them for you. If you use the internet a lot then it should become very easy to type in your password if you have to type it daily. However if you're logging into something that really isn't that important in the scheme of things (SSForum for example) - trust your browser. Now, back to topic. The IE vulnerability isn't a problem with the password manager it's self, it's a problem that occurs due to an invalid pointer reference in the data binding function of IE. So, to put it more simple there are a number of sites which require data binding, and data binding is enabled by default. When it is triggered it is possible under certain conditions for an object to be released without updating the array length. If this occurs, similar effects to a buffer overflow hack can occur, where any other malicious code can be executed in the deleted memories space. Therefore, anybody with some know-how can take your password if they wish - but they could do pretty much anything else with this venerability. It leaves you completely open, and it is an IE only problem (big surprise there). Please, don't be a Microsoft fan-boy, and use something other than IE. Cheers, Lynx
Hakaku Posted December 17, 2008 Report Posted December 17, 2008 Btw, the Acid Test is designed to break browsers by effectively stretching W3C's standards to the limits; it doesn't actually give a good perception on how the browser itself handles the web as an entirety, nor does it give any indications concerning reliability, support, or security of the browser. A great example of this is Safari, which has done amazingly well on the third Acid Test, but it fails horribly as an all-around browser.
Dav Posted December 18, 2008 Author Report Posted December 18, 2008 Btw, the Acid Test is designed to break browsers by effectively stretching W3C's standards to the limits; it doesn't actually give a good perception on how the browser itself handles the web as an entirety, nor does it give any indications concerning reliability, support, or security of the browser. A great example of this is Safari, which has done amazingly well on the third Acid Test, but it fails horribly as an all-around browser. Your argument is for non-standard sites to be considerd, however standars exist for the simple reason to introduce competition into the market and allow cross-platform compatibility thus anything that is outside of the accepted standard should be ignored IMO. I know IE has much better support for the non-standard code then other browsers but this is not a good thing on the part of web devolpers who choose to make use of this IMO.
Hakaku Posted December 18, 2008 Report Posted December 18, 2008 Your argument is for non-standard sites to be considerd, however standars exist for the simple reason to introduce competition into the market and allow cross-platform compatibility thus anything that is outside of the accepted standard should be ignored IMO. I know IE has much better support for the non-standard code then other browsers but this is not a good thing on the part of web devolpers who choose to make use of this IMO.Actually, non-standard web code can be a good thing. And often, web designers choose to exploit them rather than work against it (e.g. there's a flaw in IE6 that can prevent specific CSS from being sent to the browser, without using any fancy code). Yes, not everyone will choose to do it, but in my opinion cross-browser compatibility is a far more important achievement than respecting W3C standards when creating a website. And just because a web designer uses a browser such as Firefox doesn't mean that they'll code any better. And no, my argument is for all websites to be considered. I've designed websites before and made them 100% compliant to respective standards (and had them verified): and surprisingly it was Firefox that failed over Internet Explorer. The standards don't specify everything, so it often leads to minor differences between how IE and FF (among other browsers) choose to handle them. And the problem with the Acid test is that all the browsers who pass the test, have specifically geared themselves to beat the test, and not actually fix larger problems. Though I'm not advocating IE as a better browser, it has its pros and cons just like any other. But I think it's ridiculous to become a fanboy of any browser when you don't even understand the importance of having that other 60% of your customers able to view and navigate your website properly.
Suicide_Run Posted December 19, 2008 Report Posted December 19, 2008 I thought IE tends to eat up more resources than Firefox. Not sure if thats correct, it's just I thought I read it somewhere and it may not be true. Currently using Firefox but may switch to Chrome.....anyone have info about Chrome?
Samapico Posted December 19, 2008 Report Posted December 19, 2008 I used Chrome as my primary browser for a while now. It works well... There's this annoying bug with textboxes, sometimes it's not redrawn right and it looks like you're writing over your text, but bleh... You can resize the textboxes as you wish, that's pretty cool. There are a lot of bugs that might be fixed in the current Chromium build, which is the very latest build not officially released,but I never cared to go try it out.The thing that annoys me most, however, is that for some reason I can't really use IE anymore with it. If I type something in the address bar of IE, Chrome opens and goes to the link instead :/It seems that is just me though, as I NEVER found anyone complaining about this on the Internet. Basically, if there's some site that doesn't work with Chrome, I have to navigate only with links, without typing any address... even bookmarks won't work. So my home page is google, so I make the right search and go to the site I need to go that way lol
PoLiX Posted December 21, 2008 Report Posted December 21, 2008 Reminds me... need to go and download that patch. And on the IE vs FF. There was a trend of SS users going towards FF, but in the past year most the sites I've monitored are trending back towards IE again. Probably due to the fact most the eye candy that got a lot of the not as tech savvy to FF is now in IE. That or FF3 has become so overloaded with crap, many have moved on to Chrome and other lighter browsers.
L.C. Posted December 21, 2008 Report Posted December 21, 2008 (edited) I beg to differ on the topic title. Between the three (Firefox, IE, and Opera) -- all three are equally bad. Java loads better in IE and Opera than does Firefox; Firefox is a piece of s**t when it comes to pages that are heavy in flash/java. Next to that, they're all a piece of s**t because they all try to set a standard of how pages are supposed to be rendered based on their own opinions and beliefs...rather than using a universal standard. It's one thing that can make webdesigning horrifyingly difficult. And I have found each of the three browsers better than each other in some way under different circumstances and situations. EDIT :: From experience, I have also found that using formal standards like XHTML do a worse job as far as being cross-browser compatible than would be older sites (or sites that still use this) using plain old, raw HTML coding....like the ones with tables and crap... For example - http://www.mce.k12tn.net/Indians/index.htm and http://www.mce.k12tn.net/Indians/navigatio...rican_chart.htm - these kinds are pretty much automatically cross-browser compatible with 0 rendering problems. But if you were to use a standard, such as XHTML+CSS, you can always expect to have some kind of problem coming your way. Edited December 21, 2008 by L.C.
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