September 17, 2004
The Month of Firefox
Its time to take back the web. Many of us have had to fight with the dominance of IE for years now. We had to accept its security holes, outdated standard support, and terrible rendering. We had to live with Popups, Active X Viruses, and random crashes. Some of us did not know what alternative browser to use, or thought it too complicated. That time is over. Every day now, newssites are full of reviews of the excellent Firefox browser. Firefox is based on the Gecko rendering engine (one of the best and most standard compliant) , but is quicker and simpler to use. It has an amazing plugin architecture, that makes installing additional features extremely simple. FireFox is now at Preview Release 1.0, and will probably reach Version 1.0 very soon. I recommend it to all Windows and Linux users, and hope that even Safari users on Mac OS X will give it a try. Now is the time to get rid of IE.
Update:The main reasons Firefox is more secure is that it is not a part of the operating system, so that compromising the browser does not give one access to the OS. I do not yet have enough knowledge of the internal workings of Windows to know how tightly IE is linked in, but it is definitely more than a simple user program. Furthermore, unlike IE, Firefox does not execute Active X controls, and does not support VBScript; two of the most common sources of Windows Viruses.
Posted by Can Sar at September 17, 2004 04:58 AM to category Computer Science | TrackBackI love Firefox, too, but IE is here to stay for a long time.
While I like tabbed browsing, extensions manager and the built-in pop-up blocker, how can we be really certain that Firefox is more secure than IE?
Posted by Huey on September 17, 2004 10:36 AMWell, Huey, we can never be certain of anything in the real world. However, we can look at the source code for Firefox (and word on the street has it that Mozilla people are giving bounties for security bugs) while the same cannot be said for Internet Explorer. As Can pointed out, IE also supports ActiveX, which is not designed to be secure.
For now, most viruses are still targeted at IE, which gives an additional security advantage. Obviously, if Mozilla continues to gain in popularity this edge will diminish, but I think there is something inherently positive about diversity in software.
Also, for Mac OS X users, Camino is somewhat more attractive than Firefox since it uses native widgets. It's unfortunately not developed as actively, but the Gecko rendering engine is kept up to date with the Firefox/Mozilla branch.
Posted by Michael on September 19, 2004 12:39 AM