Being Fair… Should you trust Firefox…
Just so I’m not accused of siding too much for Firefox over IE - some guy from Microsoft posted this on his blog - How Can I trust Firefox?
In this article he makes some good points about trusting the code, and digitial signatures - and there’s nothing I can say in rebuttal that hasn’t already been said in the comments on his post!
Now, I use Firefox for my normal browsing (’cos of integrated RSS plugin, Tabbed browsing, popup blocking, adblock and many other things that were missing in IE (and in some cases still are) and of course the fact that it renders sites better) - however the very old and repeatedly patched code in IE (remember, IE’s about box - and this is IE6 on XP-SP2 - the latest version) says "Based on NCSA Mosiac" (I actually remember Mosaic back in around 1994), and Netscape v1 walked all over it back then!
However, no-one has yet reported a security hole in firefox where simply loading an image from a webserver can install an activeX control…
Now, I’d like to make the point here, that I’m not anti-microsoft in any way - in fact, in my job I use Microsoft tools on a daily basis, and some of them are good and allow me to be very productive… others (especially older stuff) is very very bad in it’s way - but that’s the problem with supporting legacy stuff which for whatever reason cannot be upgraded to a newer platform.
However, the whole IE vs Firefox debate will run and run, we know IE has some well publicised security problems, which (until SP2) in it’s default state would happily let a website install software on the local PC without informing the user. Even recently there’ve been attacks on webhosts where images have been replaced with viruses and trojans! (see Aebrahim’s Blog for a recent example, or the very serious SSL hole I mentioned a few days ago)
Now IE has actually caused many sites to be "not standards compliant" - just so the developers can get the page to remotely resemble their design - firefox, being much more compliant to W3C standards often has problems with these sites - and to a user "it works in IE - firefox must be broken" - whereas in fact, it works in IE because the site had to designed to Microsoft standards, not the W3C’s.
In fact, it’s IE thats broken, but the site designers had to work around it!
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