Pros and Cons of Firefox Critically Evaluated? 674
A Dafa Disciple writes "Fred Langa of Information Week has written an article claiming to discuss the 'Pros and Cons of Firefox'. At first I was excited because I thought I was going to get to finally read an enlightening, in-depth article that critically examined the browser. I should have known better. Aside from the usual criticism of open source software, it contains a reference to a Symantec Internet Security Report which claims that more security vulnerabilities in the last six months of 2004 were found in Firefox than IE. I'll leave it to you to analyze Mr. Langa's opinion and scrutinize Symantec's study and reputation as a security software developer."
The biggest downside to Firefox (Score:4, Interesting)
Is all the plugins, extensions, chrome, files, and settings that have to be configured after you have the Firefox browser up and running [ostermiller.org]. It would be really nifty to be able to bundle all the things that I do when I install firefox into one mega "extension bundle" or some such that I could install with one click.
Re:The biggest downside to Firefox (Score:5, Interesting)
http://mozilla.doslash.org/infolister/
InfoLister is an extension for Mozilla Firefox, Mozilla Thunderbird and Nvu that collects various information about Firefox/Thunderbird and saves it to a file. Currently it prints the list of installed extensions, themes and plugins.
Re:The biggest downside to Firefox (Score:4, Informative)
+5 Ironic (Score:5, Funny)
Parent:
Re:The biggest downside to Firefox (Score:5, Insightful)
It's nice that you have everything worked out -- but this is like saying that Internet Explorer is as much of a hassle because of all those security updates you have to download. No thanks.
Re:The biggest downside to Firefox (Score:3, Informative)
Re:The biggest downside to Firefox (Score:4, Funny)
Re:The biggest downside to Firefox (Score:5, Insightful)
So if you can live with that, dont install flashblock.
Re:The biggest downside to Firefox (Score:5, Insightful)
Why is this a "downside"?
Would you prefer a 50Mb download, with 45Mb of stuff you don't ever need or use, or a 4Mb download where you can optionally add bits you want
Not everybody wants "chrome" (or themes), Flash, etc etc.
Personally I love the lean approach, with the ability to add and tweak stuff that I want over the bloated, switch off all the crap you don't want approach...
Re:The biggest downside to Firefox (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh, I'd also like it in the for of an MSI so that I can roll it out to 1,000 systems at a time via script or GPO.
You see there are users out there besides home users and their requirements are a little different than your own.
Re:The biggest downside to Firefox (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:The biggest downside to Firefox (Score:5, Informative)
Plugins, BTW, are also in that folder in the user's profile. You know, the one that's stored on a central server in your large network? Just set up firefox once on a test machine, and copy the firefox profile folder to each user's windows profile, then distribute the program files however you prefer to do that kind of thing.
This can't be the first program with a non-MSI install method that an admin of a large network has encountered...
Re:The biggest downside to Firefox (Score:3, Funny)
Pshaw, don't be so naive! You also have to create a shortcut, which is half of the install!
Re:The biggest downside to Firefox (Score:5, Funny)
Well that just blows your TCO. Better go back to IE.
Re:The biggest downside to Firefox (Score:5, Insightful)
I can see and appreciate why you'd want all the tools necessary to make that easier.
As others have already pointed out too, I like the "shopping basket" style of download too, something they should seriously consider implementing...
When I was an ISP we used to roll out customised IE using the IEAK, wondering if there's anything like that for Mozilla/Firefox that would do the job for you.
Failing that, there are a number of tools for mass rollout deployments such as you suggest (which you're probably already considerably more aware of than me if you're working in a 1,000 user environment) so I'm not sure I see what the problem is, aren't you already using such tools?
Re:The biggest downside to Firefox (Score:4, Interesting)
Otherwise, it's a stated goal for 1.1 to have an official MSI installer.
Re:The biggest downside to Firefox (Score:4, Interesting)
I like the ideas posted by others, have a shopping cart or checkbox system, allowing you to sort of preinstall various plugins. Maybe create some standardized basic functionality plugins that one may choose to download, and have an option for popular, more advanced plugins as well. You'll still have a small initial download, and will still have the option to have a very small browser.
Re:The biggest downside to Firefox (Score:5, Insightful)
Release notes for the latest 1.03 still insist you need to remove the previous version first and the installer diaables all extensions. I pass. IMO a 1.x codebase should be mature and stable enough to be installed over an existing earlier version.
Re:The biggest downside to Firefox (Score:3, Interesting)
And if you'd even bothered to do a little checking, you would know you can always open the install.rdf file in notepad/texturizer and change the "MaxVersion" to 1.0+ and it will work.
Re:The biggest downside to Firefox (Score:3, Interesting)
The problem lies in that not all users know anything beyond point and click. For these users, getting to a site that says "You will need the flash plug in to view this site correctly" is a deal breaker. Even more so when all they see is just some inocous little image that doesnt explain to them why it isn't working. (Ala the little jigsaw piece)
I wholeheartedly agree that firefox needs to have two rollouts. One with and without extensions. The idea of having an application, with an appropriate disclaimer
Re:The biggest downside to Firefox (Score:4, Informative)
Installing Flash is point-and-click. Yes, I just tried it. I'm even on Linux, and it's still point and click.
It's a little puzzle piece that says "Click here to download plugin". After that, everything's automated. You just have to click next a few times and agree to a (Macromedia) license. You don't even have to restart the browser.
If you have any suggestions on how it could be improved, please report them to bugzilla.mozilla.org, or even just post here in reply to me or email me, and I'll do it for you (assuming I agree they'd improve it).
This introduces huge licensing problems. If mozilla.org were to bundle Flash, for example, they would first have to get Macromedia's approval, and even then it would cause other problems, e.g. including it in Debian, which would most likely reject it because of the non-free license.
It also puts a lot more stress on the developers and release-candidate testers, as they have to do double the work.
That's very unfortunate :-(
You should fix your applications. You'll need to eventually, anyway, Firefox is just a good incentive to.
Most people consider the lack of ActiveX a good thing, as it strengthens security considerably.
Most people would take the opposite position here: Firefox has a much better user interface than other browsers and especially Internet Explorer. If you have any specific issues, again, either report them to bugzilla.mozilla.org or send them to me and I'll pass them along to there.
Though most people I've talked to think the support you can get in those forums is better and faster than what you get from most corporate support centers, I can understand why you might need this in a school or company. I believe there are one or perhaps even several third-party companies starting up to provide equivelant support, but I can't be certain off the top of my head. If this is a strong issue, you may want to look into it.
This I know is a real issue, because I've used it myself in school ;-) I'd point out, though, that there are plenty of other ways that students can hide what they're doing, and I've watched friends play games for hours without the teacher knowing it, even in Internet Explorer.
That's unfortunate. I'm sorry the people that found you weren't as helpful.
Re:The biggest downside to Firefox (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:The biggest downside to Firefox (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:The biggest downside to Firefox (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:The biggest downside to Firefox (Score:3, Funny)
If they don't the folks at Mozilla could consider getting one. I mean everyone is doing it.
Re:The biggest downside to Firefox (Score:5, Informative)
Its called mozilla.
Firefox is mozilla with most of the extra stuff besides the browser cut out.
Re:The biggest downside to Firefox (Score:3, Informative)
Install Firefox. Install all of your plugins, themes, decorations, bangles, tools.
Copy the Mozilla folder from your home folder application data. Application data is a hidden folder. a little digging will find it though.
On new machine install firefox.
Copy folder to the same place on new machine.
Presto. Nothing lost.
Can be used to create a custom look for your firefox across the network if you'd like. Force a backup of the folder for each user and their prefs all s
Huh? (Score:4, Insightful)
-matthew
Re:The biggest downside to Firefox (Score:3, Insightful)
Enlightening... (Score:3, Insightful)
The two aren't mutually exclusive. You weren't looking for enlightenment, you were looking to see someone agree with you.
Re:Enlightening... (Score:5, Insightful)
Assuming the OP truly was not looking for a 'yes man' style of article, it is reasonable to believe a review detailing true failings of Firefox without resorting to questionable statistics would have met the requirements for 'enlightenment'.
Re:Enlightening... (Score:3, Insightful)
In fact, one that didn't detail its true failings would NOT meet the requirements, as the OP was looking for something that "critically examined" the browser.
Re:Enlightening... (Score:5, Insightful)
Also, anybody can get access to the source of Firefox, while IE doesn't have publicly viewable source code. Comparing vulnerabilities among the two browsers is an apples and oranges afair thanks to this.
Re:Enlightening... (Score:5, Funny)
My five year old daughter could prioritize them by severity and likelihood of exploit, add in a few of her own, and generate a patch that fixes them on the three most common platforms. What lame school are you sending your kids to?
Re:Enlightening... (Score:3, Insightful)
Auditing the source code line by line is not the only way to review code -- functional testing is a less direct but effective way to improve the quality of the software.
Critical? Pfft... i've seen better. (Score:5, Insightful)
1) "Oh look! It has more vulnerabilities than IE!" (tho they fail to state how critical these are. And don't forget that Firefox 1.03 was just released, fixing these. How long it took IE to release theirs?)
and 2) "BWA! Firefox fails to render my favorite IE-only pages!" complains from users.
And that was on the last 1 1/2 pages. The others were just straw words (your usual columnist intro).
This columnist isn't enlightening, nor critical. He's just giving another misinformed opinion.
Re:Critical? Pfft... i've seen better. (Score:4, Interesting)
Even www.quicktaxweb.ca rejected my firefox on Linux install, but accepted firefox on Windows. Just change the user agent to appear like FF on Win and it was almost perfect.
What pisses me off most about FF is that there still appears to be a memory leak if you leave it running for a while. I frequently leave my PC on overnight, and when I get it in the morning it takes a ltime for FF to maximize in XP. Both work and home PC's show the same symptoms. That doesn't occur on my Linux boxen though.
And no, I didn't RTFA
Re:Critical? Pfft... i've seen better. (Score:3, Insightful)
I'll leave Firefox running for weeks on Linux and Win2K (under VMWare), and it's fine.
Re:Critical? Pfft... i've seen better. (Score:5, Insightful)
The quoted report was based on the last six months of 2004. Firefox 1.0 was officially released on November 9, 2004 http://mozillazine.org/articles/article5513.html [mozillazine.org]. So, the product was still in beta for four of the months covered by the report. Without further details from the report, it's impossible to say how many vulnerabilities were in Firefox when it was considered ready for production end-user use.
Mr. Langa is a conversational terrorist (Score:4, Interesting)
You missed the point of the poster. He wasn't unhappy about the article being critical, but being very BIASED and critical. You know, it'd be like saying that Democrats/Liberals should listen to Bill O'Riley... as if he listens to the other side.
What I hate the worst is not those who are biased, but those who claim to be things like "Fair and Balanced" when it's clear they're not.
Take for example this nice strawman argument that Mr. Langa puts forth:
Which he then cuts down systematically, as if his misposed argument had any value:I can tell when people use Conversational Terrorism [vandruff.com], and I know then that they're highly partial and unreasonable to argue with.Re:Mr. Langa is a conversational terrorist (Score:3, Interesting)
symantec (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:symantec (Score:3, Insightful)
Hmm.... since they favor Microsoft so heavily, wouldn't it be natural for them to talk smack about non-M$ browsers like Firefox.
Re:symantec (Score:5, Informative)
I personally run Grisoft's AVG for free, and Zone Alarm, and not only have I never had a virus/worm, they run a zillion times faster than Norton AntiVirus and Personal Firewall.
Symantec makes bloatware that doesn't work well. Avoid it like the plague.
Oh yeah... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:symantec (Score:5, Informative)
Regards,
Steve
Comparing Security (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually IE6 has now been out for 4 years. And a person should hope that a 4 year old product that is used by millions of people everday should have the bugs worked out if it by now.
Now as far as how to compare them check out this article. [theinquirer.net] It compares security on a very sound premise: If you keep up-to-date with updates how long are you vulnerable. The answer: IE: 51 weeks during 2004, Firefox: 8 Weeks during 2004.
Lets rephrase that; using firefox I was safe from known exploits 10 months last year. If I was an idiot and used IE, I was only safe from known exploits 1 lousy week during the whole year.
Which are you going to choose? Get FireFox! [spreadfirefox.com]
Re:symantec (Score:4, Interesting)
now i've seen reason to doubt their products. the main one i've seen come up many times is a trojan. i don't know the name off-hand. and it's with even the latest versions and definitions. you can update it today and i will almost guarantee it won't find it.
also, my other issue with their home product is that by default, it's set to try to clean the infected file. today's viruses can't be cleaned because the file is the virus. so if it can't clean it, it takes no action. that's the most absurd setting i've ever seen. they should have it set to try to clean adn then quarantine if unsuccessful. i dread looking at computers that have norton installed, you know they're infected the minute they come in.
Sorry but... (Score:5, Funny)
And I thought my life was dull. You need help my friend. Now!
timeframe of patches (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:timeframe of patches (Score:3, Insightful)
A month?
A *year*?
Seriously, you can't have critical bugs floating around out there. Sure not everyone updates the instant a patch comes out, but I want to know that a fix is at least available.
Print Version of the Article (Score:5, Informative)
In other news...Firefox 1.0.3 released (Score:5, Informative)
Firefox eased my pain (Score:5, Informative)
Security vulnerabilites my ass.
(yes I know spyware and security is different, but firefox sure is a lot less of a pain in the ass)
there's no cure-all (Score:3, Interesting)
Same old "more people use it" analogy... (Score:4, Insightful)
And the more people use it, the more it's gonna get targeted.
Just because more people drive cars than armoured vans, doesn't mean that cars are targeted more just because they're greater in number. In fact, the payload would be greater attacking armoured cars. In reality, some things are just designed with greater security in mind, from the offset.
Ah, the old "security" == "marketshare" claim. (Score:4, Informative)
My Linux box is frequently targetted, but it's all Windows exploits so it doesn't matter.Ah, so there is no such thing as "security" then.
Just "marketshare".
No matter how many software experts put in how much effort, the end result will spontaniously generate "flaws" as more people use it.
By that "logic", there is no difference between a browser ("A") written by a team of experts who focused on security
Flaws do NOT appear just because more people use the software.
Code is not magic.
Con: You can't use autocomplete (Score:3, Interesting)
If you leave autocomplete on, Firefox will save your credit card numbers in plaintext on your hard disk.
This bug has been known about for years. They won't fix it.
Re:Con: You can't use autocomplete (Score:3, Insightful)
If you're entering your CC number on a publically-shared computer, shouldn't you be manually clicking "clear" yourself? Or should the Fx developers be forced to protect you from your own carelessness?
Re:Con: You can't use autocomplete (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes. I should not have to know a damn thing about computers in order to protect my information.
Granny buys something online and sees that auto complete can save her time next time. She won't stop to think about how it works if she even stops to read anything at all before clicking "yes" to the "would you like to use auto complete" dialog.
All auto complete information should be encrypted. No excuses.
easy to detect cc numbers (Score:5, Interesting)
1. Dont do autocomplete (or make this a default off option) on ssl forms.
2. Credit card #'s are 16 digits with known prefixes. [beachnet.com] Detecting them isnt a difficult problem. Same with social security numbers.
Easy. Encryption. (Score:5, Insightful)
formhistory.dat (Score:3, Informative)
formhistory.dat is encrypted.
Wait a minute (Score:3, Insightful)
Quick summary (Score:5, Funny)
Cons: It isn't explorer**
*potentially more secure
**some pages don't render right since some people only test with explorer
Re:Quick summary (Score:3, Funny)
Oddly enough, IE doesn't render any of the pages I go to correctly. Large numbers of them have these little flashing irritating images that Firefox/Adblock doesn't have. Until IE can render the web properly I can't imagine anyone actually wanting to use it. Microsoft really needs to buck up their ideas, how can anyone read a web page when the text is obscured and broken up with these images that constantly get in the way of the
It's quite possible there are more bugs in Firefox (Score:5, Insightful)
Firefox is still under active development. It's not surprising that occasionally a new bug, including ones that compromise security will be introduced. IE, on the other hand, has been unchanged, asside from bug fixes. All development work on IE was stopped until Firefox forced their hand. I don't think there have yet been any new releases of IE since Service Pack 2, which put 6.0.2900.2180 out in the world.
So, I wouldn't be surprised if more new security problems were located in Firefox in the recent past than in IE during the same time period. That doesn't imply that there are fewer problems in IE than in Firefox, just that fewer were found in a given time period.
Which means.... practically nothing. The relevant information would be total numbers of security problems over the total number of lines of code or some similar metric, if you want to discuss the quality of the code.
If you want to know which browser is the most secure, you should look at the total number of security bugs known to exist and the severity of those bugs.
For my money, Firefox is the only browser that I trust. I run IE only when I have no choice and when that happens I send an email to the manager of the site telling them why I won't visit again.
Microsoft abandoned good engineering practices in order to grab at market share. As a result, they crippled both their browser and their operating system.
Re:It's quite possible there are more bugs in Fire (Score:4, Informative)
Exactly. Not that vulnerabily counts aren't important, but you have to dig for more information. The article said there were 13 reported for IE and 21 for Firefox in the same time period. OK. How many of those have been fixed in IE and in Firefox? What was the breakdown on severity? What platforms were affected?
If the author didn't want to go into all this detail to give a more accurate picture, he shouldn't have just thrown out those numbers. I won't go as far as to say they are meaningless, but they don't paint an accurate picture.
Issues with numbers (Score:5, Interesting)
We see a large number of nitpick vulerabilities for open source because everyone can look at the source code and try to break it every which way. OTOH, finding exploits in IE is done by testers and hackers.
Regarding dupes, visiting Secunia shows many vulnerabilies for linux distros, but you see the same ones over and over again for each distrobution.
So while I agree that no software is perfect, and Firefox does have problems that arise from time to time, as does any software, I'll still be using the fox for my net browsing.
As for those testimonies in the article from people who can't get Firefox or Thunderbird working properly, wow. I've switched people's grandparents with no computer literacy with no problem. All I can say is that their system must be jacked up.
If Firefix is as (Score:5, Insightful)
In my opinion of using the software as long as I have, I would never use IE again unless forced to. And that small amount of time I do use IE, I spend twice as much afterwards cleaning out the damn mess made by malware.
I think because of it's Open Source nature when Moz or some derivative gains market share and becomes the primary target of ad companies, it still won't make that much of an impact on the browser as a whole.
He has a web site (Score:3, Insightful)
Well taking a quick look at what he wrote i think it's the type of guy who actually enjoys starting flame wars so i wouldn't bother too much by him!
I would only like to tell him that I dissagree with him and he is a terrible writer cause he is using too much sarcasm in his writing. take for example this part from his essay:
The last time I mentioned a similar US-CERT finding, by the way, Linux partisans leapt up to tell me that US-CERT didn't know what it was doing. Linux *couldn't* have more security flaws than Windows! Everyone *knows* that Open Source software is so much better than anything from Microsoft--- right?
Also take from example this:
I wrote that article to try to help readers interested in FireFox in particular and Open Source in general to make an informed decision. There are many, many excellent, proven, objective benefits to switching to Open Source software--- but there's also a lot of misinformation, and some very, very *bad* reasons to switch.
I think that he is doing what he is preaching against: Misinformation
One page view - no ads (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.informationweek.com/shared/printableArt icle.jhtml?articleID=160900911 [slashdot.org]
US Cert (Score:3, Informative)
Where did he get this from??
Latest 10 vulnerabilities on front page are all Windows.
If you look at the bulletins like he does, you get a collection of vulnerabilities that have been patched.
US-Cert Vulnerability Notes [cert.org] is where he should be searching if he wants a proper comparison.
Firefox returns 11 results.
I didn't count how many results Internet Explorer returned, but even if you don't count pre-2004 vulnerabilities, the number is still twice as high as it is for Firefox.
Symantec (Score:3, Informative)
Langa assumes IE is the Standard (Score:5, Insightful)
I have found Firefox to be more logical looking in its layout using CSS elements and have had to rework pages more often for IE than the other way around. The problem is that many websites don't bother to check the look of a page in anything other than IE. So how is this FireFox's fault? Langa just assumes IE is getting it right and that there is no ambiguity in the way some HTML elements are specified.
In theory there may be more bugs and possible security threats lying in wait in FireFox, but here it the thing, since switching to FireFox I have had FAR fewer virus problems. Now it could just be the smaller market thing, but so what - what I care about is how many real viruses I am exposed to. You could argue that should FireFox continue to grow in popularity, so will the attacks on it by virus writers, bring it back to parity with IE. That may be, but hasn't happened yet. BUT it could just be that the open software model means more work on the code and better more secure code when it gains an even wider audience. In fact this is the horse I would bet on.
No Yahoo Logo? (Score:5, Informative)
A quick check of the source told me what was going on. I recognized the yimg URL as one that I had *BLOCKED* images from long ago. Yahoo serves tons of graphics ads all over the Internet and I just blocked them all using Firefox's native ability to block images from a particular URL.
It seems Yahoo serves their own graphics from the same server as their ads. Silly rabbit.
So, it isn't a rendering bug with Firefox, it is a feature! And a damned useful one at that.
feature + ignorance = bug? Sad.
-Charles
Can't RTFA (Score:3, Funny)
I guess I will miss it.
Exploits on the rise is interesting... (Score:5, Insightful)
But, by writing off all of Internet Explorer's problems to the "installed base" scale factor is extremely dangerous to his readers.
The problem being, since MSIE is embedded into the OS, a flaw in MSIE can be exploited from any program which uses an HTML viewer, not only the "iexplore.exe" application itself. Firefox, even when it's your default browser, still pops up in full "visiting the Web" paranoia.
Another problem, of course, relates to MSIE's very strange handling of text/plain and application/octet-stream data types. (It will actually reject the Content-type: header from the server and make up a new one based on filename suffix and/or file content... imagine sending a text/plain file from a CGI URL that has ".doc" in it and it turning into a Word file. Note that the ".doc" is in the URL, not in the downloaded file name....) I've got a CGI I just can't make with MSIE properly because it rejects my server's claim that file "foo.log" with "inline" presentation is type "text/plain" and it can display it--it insists on saving to disk... only to find out that Notepad is the right application. To work around it, I'd have to change the extra path information fed to the CGI... and I can't do that--it means something, of course.
But that problem ("feature", if you read the MS knowledgebase) is one way how people are tricked into downloading seemingly "safe" content that turns dangerous.
Plus, he makes no assessment of the security problems. He doesn't mention ANY, from ANY browser, not even as illustration--he just leaves it to the reader to plow through pages of cryptic reports from Synamtec and CERT.
And he's got no analysis of the "trouble reports" he provides for Firefox. Missing images? 99 times out of 100, that's because the Web page has backslashes in the IMG URLs--which are not part of the hierarchical URI syntax [rfc-editor.org]. (They work only in MSIE on Windows. MSIE for Macintosh will not process them the same way.)
Plus... how do we really know what security problems are fixed in MSIE? On my XP box at home, and the W2K boxes I have to use at work, the Windows Updates just say things like, "A security problem could allow an attacker access to your computer." How am I to know what that security problem is, what part of the system it affects? I don't even know if it is function I use, or even have enabled--the update information is just too terse--at that's after clicking, "Show Details".
(My main systems are Linux and Mac, so there may be a way to get more information from Windows Update, but it isn't as obvious... unlike Mac OS X Software Update, where it lists the major components right there, and links that take you to the Apple web site for more information.)
Safari has 0 vulnerabilities reported by Secunia (Score:3, Informative)
http://secunia.com/product/1543/ [secunia.com]
- Open source engine
- Less vulnerabilities discovered
- ZERO Unpatched Vulnerabilities
Why will more users = more insecurity? (Score:3, Informative)
Okay, so Firefox is less secure... (Score:3, Insightful)
If I use IE6 from the beginning, fully patched... my computer still gets a boatload of garbage attached to it.
So tell me again Mr. Langa, how is it that IE is superior, in any way? Is it superior technologically? No, you say as much yourself -- no innovation since 2001. Is it more secure? Well, with all the updates that have come out for IE, I am still not secure from spyware and malware. Does Microsoft like to patch as early and often as Mozilla? Nope -- Mozilla has set a monthly timetable to release updates and does it even earlier if the security necessitates it.
The arguement Mr. Langa presents is profoundly stupid -- and this is coming from a Microsoft advocate. More entertaining is the fact, that he refers to US-CERT listings of vulnerabilities for browsers, yet fails to mention that they do NOT recommend IE -- but rather Firefox. Go figure.
I have no problem saying that IE is an impressive browser -- especially considering that it's going on 5 years old. However, that impressiveness doesn't last, especially in the world of computing. Firefox is the next generation browser, and they have focused resources in keeping it up to date, and well built. Microsoft ABANDONED its IE team entirely -- it goes to show you the indulgence they had in pursuing the product. The NUMBER of problems Firefox has had is greater, sure... they have more dedicated testers, a more competent userbase, and discover more flaws than IE, and list them as such. Some may be very, very minor, but they are LISTED, nonetheless. Microsoft has time and time again, taken note of IE's 'small' vulnerabilities and passed them over because it doesn't necessitate the cost of fixing them versus the potential return for anything.
So yea, Firefox has more bugs. They also fix more bugs. Firefox works faster, has more features, and takes up less resources. It will NOT give me spyware, popups, and virii. IE does all of that and worse.
So tell me again Mr. Langa, does having the ABILITY to get more problems overshadow actually GETTING more problems? Microsoft is like Valve -- great products, with no updates. Which makes them damn near unusable. It's software like Office that I love, which even if there are security problems -- they still freaking work. Which is less than I can say for IE.
Scared? Uninstall it. (Score:5, Insightful)
Is Firefox the utopia of browsers? (Score:5, Insightful)
The author pretty much buries IE and M$ on security, and then proceeds to remind us not to be to fast jumping to Firefox, as it isn't perfect either. It is fairly new as software goes and we will have to wait and see now that it has enough of an installed base to attract the cyber villians.
If anything the author implied that you should walk, not run to Firefox and remember to apply your bug repellent.
BTW. I use Firefox almost exclusively, and have watched as websites have slowly gotten around the pop-up blocker, and how 1.01 came out to block the multi-language DNS hack, which IE isn't vulnerable too because it is so old.
Goes both ways. (Score:5, Insightful)
I didn't bother to do a count of items in the bulletins, as this is an utterly worthless metric. Nor do I agree that percentage of complaints is a worthwhile way to judge two competing products.
Just to dispel that idea. Consider for a moment that in his example of 1000 users of A vs. 50 users of B, a 2 person anomoly would be a 0.2% shift in the numbers for A and a 4% shift in the numbers for B. That margin of error for product B is so large as to make the whole study worthless.
On the other hand, of the items in the bulletins, Firefox did have some serious flaw, e.g. the kind that end in "would allow a malicious user to execute arbitrary code." So, the author is right that Firefox is not some panacea for security, he just fails to explain the real reason why.
Now, is Firefox more secure overall? I haven't the slightest clue. I really don't have the time and or will to go through the bulletins, aggregate all of the flaws for each browser, assign a numerical value to each severity, and then come up with a score. I offer this idea to any of those who surf
The author also brings up the old argument of, its not currently a target, so its more secure because of obscurity. I think this argument was valid, right up until Firefox hit 1.0. Before that, it was an obscure little browser which didn't get much attention. However, once it hit 1.0 it got a lot of press; and, the way I see it, this would have given a huge incentive for the black hats to start hitting Firefox, for the right to say that they had one of the first working exploits for this new browser. So, I think this argument falls apart.
So, without a real study to backup and/or revoke the idea that Firefox is more secure than IE, the only thing I have to go on is antecdotal evidence. Right now I support about 100 computers. And, because of the way we do business, each user has administrative access to their own box (fun on a bun!). Now, because of this, I have a mix of IE users and Firefox users. For the most part, the computers which I am cleaning up spyware/adware on all of the time tend to be the IE user's computers. While I do have to do an occasional cleanup of a Firefox computer, the problems tend to come from other third party apps bundled with spyware, as opposed to the IE, browsed to the wrong page and got infected spyware.
Does this mean Firefox is more secure? No, one factor, which I can't really rule out, is that the people who use Firefox also tend to be the more knowledgable computer users; so, they may simply be better at avoiding infection. As a counter example, our network engineer runs IE, and doesn't have a problem with spyware/adware, so maybe its just the person at the keyboard making the difference. But, still the preponderence of the evidence would suggest that the Firefox machines tend to be less infected, so there is some correlation, if not outright causation.
One other thing, which helps keep me on Firefox, have you ever tried to re-install IE6 SP2? Fucking pain in the ass. Some spyware/adware will attach itself to the IE DLL's, and is near impossible to get rid of. Also, I have had more than one machine where the removal of the spyware/adware has broken the IE scripting engine. This is also ignoring that crapware that damages winsock as it gets removed. Thank <insert diety here> for the automated winsock repair tool.
MS has made re-installing IE harder and harder as they have released updates. In IE5 I could do an add/remove programs on it, and get a reinstall out of it. In IE6 SP1, I could futz with the registry and get it to allow a re-install. Now that seems to be broken, as the MS recommended registry change to allow a reinstall seems to be broken. Th
Security isn't nearly as big of a problem for IE.. (Score:3, Insightful)
I used to spend a lot of time fixing friends computers because of viruses. Now, I spend it in cleaning up spyware. Spyware that was installed compliments of Internet Explorer, and has forced their machine to a GRINDING HALT.
Yet, I am still waiting for the first person that I have to spend 4 hours cleaning up spyware after they've switched to Mozilla/Firefox/Thunderbird.
Until I have confidence in IE to block popups, and stop installing apps w/out question (and I won't even to into FEATURES, like tabbed browsing, in-page document search, etc.), I'll stick to Firefox, thanks.
every... single... fucking... time.... (Score:5, Insightful)
WHO THE FUCK CARES?!?!? All these dumbass writers need to learn that all bugs are NOT created equal. There is a BIG ASS DIFFERENCE between "small flaw that could theoretically be exploited but the good guys found it first and fixed it in two days anyway" and "gaping hole in the default configuration with thousands of exploits in the wild for months on end." I mean, fucking A, how awesome is it to run Windows Update and see a warning like this [microsoft.com]? "Identified security issues in Internet Explorer could allow an attacker to compromise a Windows-based system... This affects all computers with Internet Explorer installed ( even if you don't run Internet Explorer as your Web browser ). [emphasis added]"
Which would you rather live in: a city with a hundred arsonists or a thousand litterbugs?
Good Article, Wrong Conclusion/Timing (Score:3, Insightful)
However, the article does make good arguements... that is, if the article was written 5 years from now. Firefox is not a mature browser. 4 years after release, IE 6 still has bugs, no new verson yet. Firefox has only been 1.0 for less than a year. There is certainly a break in period after software of this type reaches critical mass before every bug is vetted.
What the author fails to understand is that by it being open source, more bugs can be found, faster, and fixed, faster. I would certainly HOPE that there are more bugs in Firefox found on a month to month basis. Internet Explorer keeps chugging alone, spitting out new vulnerabilities like breadcrumbs. Firefox on the other hand is now very public, and getting a large influx of bug reports and fixes. However, after Firefox has killed 99.9% of its bugs, Internet Explorer will keep popping out exploits like an assymbly line because limitting the source code means that:
A) A small number of coders can actually look for exploits. Everyone else is basically left to hope that the next IE hacker publishes their exploit. And, once found, you sit back and wait for MS to fix it, instead of coding the fix yourself, or at least submitting fix code, or just even pointing out the area of code that is the problem. With IE, it's not as though you can e-mail them and say, "I found exploit X... It's occurring around line 7934 of file Y."
B) Firefox can truly change focus on a dime, just like with the IDN issue a few months ago. It doesn't take a manager of a manager of a manager to hold 50 meetings, talk with investors, talk with worldwide vendors, talk with politicians, and then make a decision at Mozilla. And, if you don't like Mozilla's decisions, it's open source, and you can always go "fork" yourself.
Is Firefox more secure? No. It's not supposed to be right now. Does it have more features? Yes. Is it easier to use? For me, yes. WILL it be more secure than IE once the initial round of exploits have been found? Damn skippy! And THAT is why Firefox is more secure, and why Lynx is still used today. Open Source projects, especially ones that have a great single goal in mind, like just browsing (leaving all the fluff to 3rd parties) eventually turns out something rock hard solid and stable.
It's just the "new" or "continually growing" ones that will have many of the same pitfalls of closed source. The only difference, is that even with those pitfalls, open source still has all of its other benefits.
Good article on statistics. Wrong conclusion and timing. Just another example of some writer trying to make themselves heard over the masses by trying to sail against the current. Unfortunately, his dingy is too small for this trip.
huge fucking memory leak (Score:3, Insightful)
Is this problem being addressed? If they can't fix such a gigantic memory leak how could I expect them to fix more obscure security issues?
Re:GPO Control (Score:5, Interesting)
Have you tried this by chance?
I haven't personally, but I keep hearing good things about it.
A few good (pieces of software) (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Cons of Mac Firefox (Score:3, Informative)
That having been said, I agree with the assessment that Firefox for Mac has a lot of catch-up to do to match Safari in terms of aesthetics. It's one of the biggest cons of choos
Re:Mod Parent Down-Malicious Perl Code in Sig (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Mod Parent Down-Malicious Perl Code in Sig (Score:3)
Then again, using obfuscated perl to get your point across also gets brownie points, so I'd call it even, however a warning label would be nice.
Re:Mod Parent Down-Malicious Perl Code in Sig (Score:3, Insightful)
Who's preaching? (Score:4, Insightful)
So, getting your point across while still being part of the Slashdot community would involve a sig with obfuscated Perl code that printed:
You dumb ass, this could could have just run rm -rf!
Being an asshat Script-kiddie would involve a sig with obfucated Perl code that actually runs rm -rf.
Re:Mod Parent Down-Malicious Perl Code in Sig (Score:5, Informative)
Adding whitespace
($?) ? s:;s:s;;$?:
: s;;=]=>%-{<-|}<&|`{;
y; -/:-@[-`{-};`-{~" -;
s;;$_;see
$? is equal to zero normally, so that's the same as
s//=]=>%-{<-|}<&|`{/;
y/ -\/:-@[-`{-}/`-{~" -/;
s//$_/see
The first statement => $_ = '=]=>%-{<-|}<&|`{';
second translates $_ to 'system"rm -rf ~"'
third: eval $_
Re:Mod Parent Down-Malicious Perl Code in Sig (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Cons of Mac Firefox (Score:3, Informative)
The reason why everything looks the same on a Mac is that developers use the system frameworks to draw their on-screen controls. If a program has a control that looks wrong, as Firefox does, that's because the program actually is wrong. If it were using the correct frameworks to draw its controls, the controls would look right.
This is a case where the fact that it looks wrong is a sign that it really is wrong.
Now, as for Safari, it's not perfect. But then again, neither is
Re:Open Source Security (Score:3, Insightful)
Closed source doesn't have those problems? What planet are you from? New exploitable flaws are found in Windows and IE on almost a daily basis. Seriou
Re:More exploits? (Score:3, Interesting)
No, security by obscurity provides a fairly good amount of security assuming you can keep your code secure. The benefit of open source is that you [hopefully] write better code and/or have better testing that eliminates that major security problems before it goes into production. There's been a bunch of escalation of priviledge flaws discovered in Linux in the past few months that use obscure race conditions and the like. Those would have been extremely unlikely to