The Browser Wars are But a Skirmish

[Jason Dunn]

<div class='os_post_top_link'><a href='http://news.zdnet.co.uk/story/0,,t269-s2123095,00.html' target='_blank'>http://news.zdnet.co.uk/story/0,,t2...2123095,00.html</a><br /><br /></div>"Usage of the latest Mozilla browser doubled and Netscape 7 grew by 67 percent but the latest browser study shows that Internet Explorer 6 is king. The latest Mozilla and Netscape Web browsers are cropping up on more computers worldwide, but they still only represent a few trees in a forest of Microsoft's Internet Explorer browsers. According to new research from Amsterdam-based OneStat.com, Mozilla 1.0 global usage has grown from 0.4 percent in June to 0.8 percent this month, nearly four months after its release. Netscape 7.0 global usage has risen from 0.3 percent to 0.5 percent in the same period. <br /><br />In comparison, global usage for Microsoft's latest browser, IE 6, has grown from 46.4 percent to 52.3 percent from June to September, the study found. In total, Microsoft's collection of IE browsers comprise 94.9 percent of the market; the browsers of AOL Time Warner-owned Netscape and Mozilla represent 3 percent of the market; and Opera comprises 0.9 percent."<br /><br />We catch some flak on this Web site for being so IE-centric, so I wanted to post this article in my defence. :wink: We'll always try to be as cross-browser friendly as possible, but ultimately if I have to make a choice between using our resources for adding new features or optimizing for other browsers, new features are going to win. While we're on the subject though, other than our incompatibility with Netscape 4.x, are there any browser issues we should be made aware of? Yes, yes, I know the forums don't yet work with Pocket Internet Explorer - next comment.

[Janak Parekh]

Jason, while you have good points, a couple of comments:

- The percentage amongst the technology elite using Mozilla is much higher;

- Of course you can't optimize the site for every platform, but at least make it useable by Mozilla/Netscape 7, which it works perfectly with now and with which I use it every day;

- Ironically, I would not worry too much about compatibility with Netscape 4.7x. It's too difficult nowadays, and that's an outdated, unsupported browser. I'd do a browser check and if that matches the User-Agent, urge the end-user to upgrade. But that's me. :)

--janak

[Kati Compton]

You could always tell them that their browser isn't supported, and direct them to the mobile site which I would THINK would use simple enough tags for old browsers, wouldn't it? I'm just guessing here, as I'm too lazy to click "Mobile" and check the code myself. ;)

[Cortex]

the IT admins at a hospital i work for went with netscape as their system browser and let me just tell you how much it SUCKS!

people whine about how microsoft is a monopoly that stiffles competition ... blah blah blah, but the reality is microsoft steals other peoples software and then out performs them. IE is an excellent example and MediaPlayer is another. I just installed beta 9 and its excellent!

(Sorry QuickTime and RealNewtorks -- perhaps you should call your legal department and get in line...)

[Jonathon Watkins]

In total, Microsoft's collection of IE browsers comprise 94.9 percent of the market; the browsers of AOL Time Warner-owned Netscape and Mozilla represent 3 percent of the market; and Opera comprises 0.9 percent.

8O Now THAT's market share! 8O

But - Netscape was so bad that MS completely deserved it. I had to use NS while working at HP and it was Dreadfull. I work by onpeing many browser windows at once and flicking between them. NS would ALWAYS crash at some point and I would have to start opening up 20 hard-to-locate web pages again- and again - and again. :evil:

MS Internet Exploder was just SOOOOOooooooo much better back then -and it has gotten better. :D Ok - still room for improvement - but isn't there always.

[KyleC]

This isn't an "issue" but I realized that the link to the threads from the main site now links to the post number, not the thread number. It may be this way for other parts of the site as well. However, when I reply to the thread, the thread number shows, instead of the post number. :?

EDIT: Oh, and in the main Forum page, it says there are ~60,000 topics. Hardly. More like 6500. I think you must have modified the code too many times. ;)

[JonnoB]

... IE and the shell ....

As much as people want to strip out the browser from the shell, that was one of the most brilliant and turns out, most usefull integrations in the OS. IE and the shell have become so integrated that it really is a dream to flow between browsing the local machine, ftp, and http seamlessly. It would be a mistake to force MS to ever break them apart. I consider them one and the same now.

[Daniel]

I agree with Janak, dump NS 4.x.

Actually I have to point out that, having done a fair bit of cross browser work, that it is fairly easy to support scripting (dhtml) across IE/Mozilla/NS7.x there are fairly simple changes which handle most of the differences.
The old pixel size problems are the worst though, darn irritating and annoying to fix too.
I'm on a Mac, OSX 10.2.3, using Chimera (Small very fast geko based browser). The site seems to work well. I haven't noticed any problems with it.
On the subject of MS and Netscape, I have to say at about v.3 IE was about equal to NS IMO. After 3 IE was well ahead. The problem is though that it is Microsoft that does not adhere to standards and therefore are the ones causing issues with browser compatibility (in recent browsers that is). I'm all for innovation on Microsofts part but when a workable alternative becomes part of the standard they should adopt it and depricate their non-standard alternative.

Daniel

[someppcuser]

Jason, while you have good points, a couple of comments:

- The percentage amongst the technology elite using Mozilla is much higher;

- Of course you can't optimize the site for every platform, but at least make it useable by Mozilla/Netscape 7, which it works perfectly with now and with which I use it every day;

- Ironically, I would not worry too much about compatibility with Netscape 4.7x. It's too difficult nowadays, and that's an outdated, unsupported browser. I'd do a browser check and if that matches the User-Agent, urge the end-user to upgrade. But that's me. :)

--janak

Ditto ;)

[someppcuser]

... but the reality is microsoft steals other peoples software and then out performs them...
Outperforms..hum..in what sense. Put in as many security vulnerabilities as you can fit? Make the browser more bloat? Integrate it as much as you can with an OS so that you can make both unstable?
Really I don't see the improvements. IE6 is lagging in term of speed, security and functionalities.

People stay with IE until they get some serious problem, then they think and try to find alternatives. I guess not enough people had their HD remotely erased to realized how flawed that app is :roll:

Yeah I sound anti-MS again, but IE is that bad...

[JonnoB]

People stay with IE until they get some serious problem, then they think and try to find alternatives. I guess not enough people had their HD remotely erased to realized how flawed that app is :roll:

Yeah I sound anti-MS again, but IE is that bad...

I have IE6 with WinXP... been running WinXP for a year now and have yet to have a single crash viewing web pages. The auto-update has kept my system up to date and low on the security risk relative to others. I also have tried various iterations of the NS releases and I would call them far from stable. If you are having problems with IE, perhaps you should look at overall system stability?

[Ed Hansberry]

- The percentage amongst the technology elite using Mozilla is much higher;

You misspelled "snobs."




:lol: :lol:

[Janak Parekh]

You misspelled "snobs."
Hey, someone got a "thwack" smiley over here? ;)

I have IE6 with WinXP... been running WinXP for a year now and have yet to have a single crash viewing web pages. The auto-update has kept my system up to date and low on the security risk relative to others.
IE has, admittedly, had quite a few vulnerabilities over the last 6 months. MS has been reasonably up-to-date in patching them, as you mention, but I wonder what ever came out of that "Trustworthy Computing Initiative". Personally I think they should scan the code for every instance of "gets", "scanf", and "cin" and dock the programmer that used such buffer overflow-vulnerable functions.

In any case, I'd say Mozilla has an edge in security, but IE6 is quite stable and a bit faster. Not worth crying about either way, and certainly not worth getting into a traditional IE-versus-Mozilla debate.

--janak

[Jonathon Watkins]

- The percentage amongst the technology elite using Mozilla is much higher;

You misspelled "snobs."




:lol: :lol:

:lol: :splat: Lovely - and very true. :razzing: :lol:

[someppcuser]

I have IE6 with WinXP... been running WinXP for a year now and have yet to have a single crash viewing web pages. The auto-update has kept my system up to date and low on the security risk relative to others. I also have tried various iterations of the NS releases and I would call them far from stable. If you are having problems with IE, perhaps you should look at overall system stability?

The auto-update cannot keep you safe because MS takes too much time to fix problems. The only way to be a little more safe is to disable ActiveX, but then you won't see the nice poll results from this site ;)

The problem is, you are aware that IE has more holes than swiss cheese and can react accordingly. Most of those 95% IE users don't have a clue. They got IE with their OS and have never updated it unless they came accross some newscast telling them that they should really do something about it.
It' so easy to bring people to some fake site that can make some serious damage =(

[someppcuser]

And true...I don't want to be in a mozilla-IE6 war. I just wish MS would put IE in a sandbox. Maybe in IE7 which will steal all the cool features of Mozilla and Opera ;)

[Daniel]

I wonder what ever came out of that "Trustworthy Computing Initiative".
Bill G, alegedly it's his "pet project".

I think that MS tends to do a poor job on some of its software in terms of security. I'm sure the people working on it do the best that they can but still, some of the bugs that come out are unbelievable. I don't think the OS/IE integration really helps in this respect.

What gets me is that MS wants to stop people announcing that there is a bug in their software, so you as the user will be completely unaware of the security risks you are facing as you browse the internet. I agree that posting bugs on the net and then explaining how to exploit them may not be the best thing to do but at least letting people know is a Good Thing™ IMO.

Daniel

[Kati Compton]

I'm probably going to switch to Mozilla soon. Right now I use IE because I also use Y! Companion. Basically, my time was divided between 3 computers and I didn't want to go through the hassle of keeping bookmarks current on each, nor did I want to have to browse to a page to GET the bookmarks. I like them in a menubar. But now I'm basically working from home so only have my laptop and desktop to worry about. I can probably handle keeping those bookmarks sychronized, especially since I have that handy network connection between them.

[Janak Parekh]

I'm probably going to switch to Mozilla soon. Right now I use IE because I also use Y! Companion.
This is the one thing I miss sorely about IE. I manually navigate to http://bookmarks.yahoo.com right now. :? Plus, I've memorized about 90% of the site names I visit, and my browser history takes care of the rest.

Y! Companion could be coded in Mozilla, as it supports a language called "XUL" for building plugins, but it hasn't been done yet.

--janak

[Kati Compton]

Y! Companion could be coded in Mozilla, as it supports a language called "XUL" for building plugins, but it hasn't been done yet.


Looks like you'd better get to work, then. ;)

[Gremmie]

Doesn't PIE report as a Mozilla 4 browser? :?

[wrightca]

...It' so easy to bring people to some fake site that can make some serious damage =(

And I suppose we could protect everyone, even the stupid people, by glueing the ON/OFF switch in the OFF position?

You must be smarter than the tools you use.

[JonnoB]

IE and the Windows OS as the leader in market share exhibit the largest target for virii writers and hackers looking to expose security holes. Is the OS and IE fundamentally flawed? I would doubt that it was any moreso than other desktop-designed operating systems. Being a primary target will in the long run force greater security and should the OS playing field ever be leveled by market dynamics, I would venture to say that MS ends up with a leg up in security.

[Daniel]

JonnoB has a point, there have been a number of bugs for other OSes in the recent past. I still don't think that we should be arguing that because MS is the biggest target that we should expect to see more bugs. I don't think he meant it as such but it sounds like an excuse. It's not ok, no matter the size of the market share or company, to have security holes in software that can cause so much damage. Obviously there will be bugs, no software is bug free (ok, maybe NASA) but that does not excuse bugs.

Daniel

[The Big Jay]

- The percentage amongst the technology elite using Mozilla is much higher;

You misspelled "snobs."




:lol: :lol:

Everybody's a snob in their own way :) :)

[Mike Temporale]

IE and the Windows OS as the leader in market share exhibit the largest target for virii writers and hackers looking to expose security holes. Is the OS and IE fundamentally flawed? I would doubt that it was any moreso than other desktop-designed operating systems. Being a primary target will in the long run force greater security and should the OS playing field ever be leveled by market dynamics, I would venture to say that MS ends up with a leg up in security.

Exactly. Take a look at Security Focus's statistics (http://online.securityfocus.com/sfonline/vulns/stats.shtml). They list RedHat as havig 54 OS bugs reported in 2001, Windows nt/2000 had 42. Both are pretty high. The difference here is that Microsoft has a larger market share, so when there is a bug, it's plastered all over the news.

If I went out the local best buy, and purchased the latest redhat, installed that on my home computer. I would be just as vulernable as any windows user. It's no better out of the box. You have to kow that there are updates out there, and how to do install them. Thanks to XP's auto-update being turned on by default, there's one less thing for the average person to be concerned about.

[Warthog]

[quote=Janak Parekh]- The percentage amongst the technology elite using Mozilla is much higher;

You misspelled "snobs."
:lol: :lol:

Okay, call me a technology snob. I'm a developer, both for handhelds and web sites (coding, not just HTML), using a wireless network with 40 - 50 Avaya AP-3 hubs.

Buuuuuut I use IE. Especially now that the news page introduced me to Avant IE, it kicks some serious tail to have an MDI interface. Netscape lost my vote a long time ago, and I've always been against the idea of owing too much to MS.

But credit to where credit's due, IE is a pretty good browser. All of Windows may (and probably does) have security flaws, but if security is your prime factor then you'd be running OpenBSD or you'd manage your security other ways.

On the topic of wireless, I would kill ten men if there was an option with the Toshiba e740's to use an Agere based chipset rather than the Prism II or Hermes or whatever crap it is these things have. We have 5 of them and they don't hold a stick to a nice Agere chipset card in terms of reception, speed, or power consumption.

Warty.

[Kevin Remhof]

OK, i'm finally becoming a convert to Mozilla. I work as in web development and fight with Netscape 4.x all day long. But, I now run Mozilla at home and at work.

I really like being on the cutting edge of browsers. IE is fine but Mozilla has some nifty features such as Mouse Gestures. Very handy stuff.

Plus, at work I have to kill my cookies at least a few times everyday. So, I can't easily keep my favorite cookies (here, My Yahoo, etc.) around. To solve this, I run Mozilla for my personal browsing.

[James]

Exactly. Take a look at Security Focus's statistics (http://online.securityfocus.com/sfonline/vulns/stats.shtml). They list RedHat as havig 54 OS bugs reported in 2001, Windows nt/2000 had 42. Both are pretty high. The difference

Actually, those numbers are ancient at this point (2001), though I suspect the trend has continued.

[James]

I gave up on Mozilla, though I might switch back with the next release. I've been using Phoenix in the mean time, and even though it's just as SLOW starting up as Mozilla, it's faster after that, and a lot cleaner. Still really in alpha though, but it's rather stable.

[Janak Parekh]

IE and the Windows OS as the leader in market share exhibit the largest target for virii writers and hackers looking to expose security holes. Is the OS and IE fundamentally flawed? I would doubt that it was any moreso than other desktop-designed operating systems.
I agree on the popularity bit, but still, comparing against "other OS's" is not the way to judge it. I agree that subtle vulnerabilities, like something with the IE zones mechanism, are hard to avoid, due to the inherent complexity of the OS or the browser. But software, especially Windows & IE, still suffer from one too many buffer overflows, and it's not like these are unavoidable: they are! No one should have a good excuse today for buffer overflows, be it Microsoft, Netscape, or anyone else.

Buuuuuut I use IE. Especially now that the news page introduced me to Avant IE, it kicks some serious tail to have an MDI interface. Netscape lost my vote a long time ago, and I've always been against the idea of owing too much to MS.
Avant Browser is indeed a nice addition, and makes IE useable :) I agree with you that any non-new version of Netscape (3.x, 4.x, and 6.x) were absolutely terrible, but Mozilla is hardly the same beast. I feel for all the web developers who have to support the terribly broken product Netscape 4.x is.

--janak

[Mike Temporale]

Exactly. Take a look at Security Focus's statistics (http://online.securityfocus.com/sfonline/vulns/stats.shtml). They list RedHat as havig 54 OS bugs reported in 2001, Windows nt/2000 had 42. Both are pretty high. The difference

Actually, those numbers are ancient at this point (2001), though I suspect the trend has continued.

True, but 2002 just ended, so with any luck they will update the numbers soon.

The weakest link is the user. If you don't apply patches, regardless of the OS, then it's your own fault. If you choose to write your password on a sticky note, or use a simple 3-4 letter password, you're just asking for problems.

[ChrisW]

Is the OS and IE fundamentally flawed? I would doubt that it was any moreso than other desktop-designed operating systems. Being a primary target will in the long run force greater security

Jonno is right. MS's PR department is just too incompetent to get the word out. Here's some excerpts from a column ( http://www.objectwatch.com/issue_37.htm ) by Roger Jennings, one of the leading experts in object systems and architectures:


The main agency that tracks security issues is Carnegie Mellon's CERT Coordination Center (CERT/CC - formally known as the Computer Emergency Response Team Coordination Center). CERT/CC has been tracking security issues since 1988, and some alarming trends can be seen by examining their data

...

The third category of security problems is sloppy programming on the part of the software infrastructure vendor. It turns out that this is BY FAR the most common category of security problems at the corporate infrastructure level. It is so common, that I have assigned it its own acronym: SPSP (sloppy programming security problem). This type of security problem is the most difficult to guard against.

The company most frequently criticized for its SPSPs is Microsoft. And based on my analysis of the last two years of infrastructure related CERT/CC advisories, I would have to agree that this criticism is not unfounded.

Microsoft has stumbled in the area of security. Two advisories in particular make one question Microsoft's competence in software quality control...

So we see two advisories pointing to sloppy programming practices on the part of the Microsoft infrastructure development teams. Two advisories is two too many. But as we look at the Unix/Linux situation, we quickly realize that comparatively, two is not a bad record. Perhaps that is the saddest part of this story.

Sun, quick to cry "Microsoft security problems!", is one of the last companies that should be pointing fingers. On the topic of "buffer overflows" alone, Sun's Solaris seems strongly implicated in at least 7 advisories, all of which potentially allow intruders to run arbitrary code with root (unrestricted) access...Sun is in good company. IBM's AIX appears to have 6 infrastructure buffer overflow security advisories, including some overlap with Sun's.

...

While we can't always tell which Unix products are impacted by which specific problems, we can certainly see that Unix as a whole is rife with SPSPs. The following Unix sub-systems have all been implicated in what appears to be one or more SPSPs: Bind, FTP, lpd, LDAP, Telnet, CDE, Login, Secure Shell, DNS, Kerberos, PGP ("pretty good protection" [sic]), RPC, TCP/IP, and LPRng.

In contrast, the only Microsoft infrastructure systems that seem to have SPSPs are IIS and Universal Plug and Play [note that here he's talking specifically about server-type stuff and not IE]. IIS looks particularly problematic, with 5 advisories (CA-2001-10, 12, 13, 19, and 23). Based on this record, Microsoft would be well advised to subject the entire IIS system to a strict security audit and review. Still, compared to Unix/Linux, two sub-systems isn't a bad record.

[Janak Parekh]

Jonno is right. MS's PR department is just too incompetent to get the word out. Here's some excerpts from a column ( http://www.objectwatch.com/issue_37.htm ) by Roger Jennings, one of the leading experts in object systems and architectures
There's something wrong with this report. A large number of vulnerabilities are also in IE and Outlook. A major one was just announed in MDAC. Looking at this page (http://www.microsoft.com/technet/treeview/default.asp?url=/technet/security/default.asp), the three newest vulnerabilities are in the Windows Explorer shell, the kernel timer, and SMB signing. While IIS has been the worst, there have been patches for about 20 different modules in the OS.

Looking further, the real problem is the date of the report -- January 16, 2002. That was before most of the most serious vulnerabilities in Windows 2k, XP, and Office were discovered which triggered Bill Gates's bug-hunting initiative (which by all means was not really a success).

In any case, as I said earlier, "comparing" is not the best way to go about it. As IIS is indeed one of the main problems, as the article mentioned, Microsoft should do a thorough audit of the code. Additionally, as a sysadmin who administers a lot of Win2k and XP boxes, I'd like to see Microsoft start building service packs more quickly. It's a real pain to have to do several rounds of Windows Update patches for each computer.

Oh, and by the way, kudos to the Exchange team at Microsoft - despite having a huge legacy architecture to work with (Microsoft Mail/x.400), they have managed to build a reasonably vulnerability-free product. Scalability issues aside, I've not had to worry about Exchange all that much. It just goes to show that good coding practices can solve the problem.

--janak

[Daniel]

Here's some excerpts from a column ( http://www.objectwatch.com/issue_37.htm ) by Roger Jennings, one of the leading experts in object systems and architectures:

It's fairly well known these days that Microsoft is not necessarily the worst but given the exposure I weight their bugs higher. With supposedly above 90% of the desktop market and a bit less of the server market they really can't afford to have "sloppy programming" errors. *nix is no panacea to solve all ills though. I'd be interested to know what number of these errors were in the OSS projects that are out there.

Daniel

[PlayAgain?]

In fairness to Microsoft (did I just say that?), I recently read an article that pointed out that the vast majority of vulnerabilities that Microsoft have to patch are found by geeks, and many of the internet's most hardcore hackers wouldn't really know how to exploit them.

I guess things would be much worse if Microsoft didn't provide any security updates at all. Let's be grateful for small mercies.

Most people don't have any trouble at all with IE, and it's only those who consider themselves important imagine that there are hackers out to get at what's on their hard drives and start ranting on about privacy.

Get a good virus checker, a tidy firewall and avoid Microsoft E-Mail clients and your normal, average, man in the street user should be safe. Anyone who is twp enough to use Outlook is asking for trouble.

[James]

True, but 2002 just ended, so with any luck they will update the numbers soon.
One would hope, but they had been keeping monthly stats as well, and those went by the wayside.

The weakest link is the user. If you don't apply patches, regardless of the OS, then it's your own fault. If you choose to write your password on a sticky note, or use a simple 3-4 letter password, you're just asking for problems.
Many of our jobs would be so much easier without those pesky users! Unfortunately, these days I'm finding that the unqualified 'system administrator' is even more to blame.

[Kati Compton]

This is the one thing I miss sorely about IE. I manually navigate to http://bookmarks.yahoo.com right now. :? Plus, I've memorized about 90% of the site names I visit, and my browser history takes care of the rest.

Y! Companion could be coded in Mozilla, as it supports a language called "XUL" for building plugins, but it hasn't been done yet.


A friend just pointed these out to me, but as I have not yet installed Mozilla, I do not know much about them:

Bookie (http://bookie.mozdev.org/screenshots.html)
Companion (http://companion.mozdev.org/screenshots.html)

Make sure to scroll down - on IE at least there's a big blank space at the top. Maybe that's just to confuse non-Mozilla browsers, though... ;)

[Janak Parekh]

A friend just pointed these out to me, but as I have not yet installed Mozilla, I do not know much about them:
Thanks much, Kati :D I'll play with them. I think I've heard of the 2nd one, but I don't think it supports serverside communication, and probably won't anytime soon.

--janak

[Jonathan1]

Exactly. Take a look at Security Focus's statistics (http://online.securityfocus.com/sfonline/vulns/stats.shtml). They list RedHat as havig 54 OS bugs reported in 2001, Windows nt/2000 had 42. Both are pretty high. The difference here is that Microsoft has a larger market share, so when there is a bug, it's plastered all over the news.


No the difference is that Red Hat and Linux is open source so ANYONE (And there are A LOT of anyone’s out there.) can pick apart the OS looking for bugs. No one can see the source code for Windows. The only ones privileged enough to see the source are MS employees a far cry from the masses of people that continually tweak Linux. People pick it apart as best they can but simply put its takes a hell of a lot of work to find holes. To be sure you can bet there are a ton more since MS themselves have admitted, under oath, they do security through obscurity in their code. I have to imagine the reason for this is they can't do something in widows without some gaping hole being in there. Don't know why this would be the case *shrugs* but that's pure speculation.

Simply put MS is never going to get rid of their security problems until they build an OS literally from the ground up with security in mind. Period.

Then you have this Palium or however it’s spelled. Security and digital copyright management through hardware is so f-ed up and Orwellian in nature I can't even talk about it without getting steamed for hours afterwards. It’s a messed up method of fixing MS security blunders.

[Kirkaiya]

IE and the Windows OS as the leader in market share exhibit the largest target for virii writers and hackers looking to expose security holes. Is the OS and IE fundamentally flawed? I would doubt that it was any moreso than other desktop-designed operating systems. Being a primary target will in the long run force greater security and should the OS playing field ever be leveled by market dynamics, I would venture to say that MS ends up with a leg up in security.

I use Win 2K on my laptop, and for my desktop (which is virtually unused, except for a print server), WinXP.

If we were discussing Win9x (Win 95/98/Me), then I would completely disagree, since there was no security at all, and the kernal itself had, by microsoft's own admission, "thousands" of bugs.

However, even with the Windows NT 5.x OS (which is what Windows 2000 and Windows XP are based on), there are fundamental issues. Unless you go into the user administration and change it (which the average user will never do), most people still log-in with an account that has administrator priveleges.

That means that any virus, or malicious program of any sort that you inadvertently execute have access to *everything*. While *yes*, people can create a normal "user" account, and log in with that, they are then forced to "log out" in order to install software, etc.

I think it would be better if, by default, people are logged in with "user level" access, and when they attempt to do something that requires admin level (ie., registry changes, or altering system files, installs), they would be prompted for the Admin login/password on the fly.

Microsoft has done something akin to this in Outlook, in response to all the Outlook VBS viruses - now, whenever some plug-in or macro tries to access my contacts or messages, I get a pop-up asking if I want to grant access, and a choice of minutes (1 to 10 minutes) to grant it.

There are actually third-party products that DO "add on" this to the Windows OS (5.x) itself; eWeek magazine's annual "Hack" contest that pits a Linux box versus a Windows box used one this year, and for the first time in 4 years, the Win box didn't get hacked at all.

Now - about people needing to be "smarter than the tools" - How is it that we spell "snobs" again? :wink: (teasing). While those of us who work with PCs every day might understand the importance of tweaking the OS to be more secure (and apply our patches, etc), there are millions of users who just want their computer to work like a toaster.

My clients have included government workers, and (currently) Microsoft themselves, and even a lot of people at MSFT who are in sales and marketing have very little clue about how to secure their OS, what a .vbs file is, or how to lock down Outlook, etc.

Okay - this was WAAAYYY off-topic from the browsers; I have both IE 6 and Mozilla 1.0 installed, and they're both great. People who properly code HTML, DHTML and ECMAScript (Javascript) to the W3C and ECMA standards will create pages that render fine and work fine in both. Web-wackers just need to start using "document.getElementByID" instead of the (MS-specific-extension), "document.all", among other things.

Netscape 4... well, when it came out it was pretty cool (the first to support any DHTML at all), but it's such a piece-o-crap to use now, I pretty much gave up on supporting it on any pages that require a lot of client-side activity.

I think that XML support is more fully integrated into IE than Mozilla 1.0, although I haven't played with the latest 1.1 release - it's easier to do client-side transforms (still haven't seen that done in Mozilla - if you know how to apply a transform in Mozilla, let me know), and I like using XML data islands (I don't think they're in the w3c rfc yet, but...).

Now that we're all getting broad-band, maybe its time to put more of the processing back onto the server, and let the browser do what it was originally built for: displaying the result.. hmmm

[Kirkaiya]

Well, I just downloaded the newer version of Mozilla (v 1.2.1), and after playing with the XSL stylesheet header, I can now get the browser to do a transform (of course, it now gives me an XSL error in IE, but at least I could keep 2 different copies of the XSL on the server, and append the correct reference on the fly).

I haven't tried doing a transform in script - probably later, although I tend to do most of the "work" now on the server for web-applications (you can then ignore most browser differences, etc).

Anyway - the 1.2.1 version is REALLY nice - I'm using it to type this now. It's fast and clean, and i LIKES it!! :-)

[Madoc Owain]

I've been a Netscape user since Day 1, and am SO thankful Mozilla was finally released. NS/AOL really dropped the ball when it came to fixing bugs in the NS4.xx browser, to the point where I was getting ready to switch to a new browser. Once I tried Mozilla, however, all my problems were solved.

Greatest thing about Mozilla - NO POPUPS! You can turn them off, and still allow those popups that YOU request by clicking on something. I've made many converts out of IE users simply by showing them what browsing without popups is like.

Another great feature is the tabbed browsing - no more opening up 90 zillion windows when I go to a site that has a number of great links. I'm a power-browser, and like to have as many as 2 dozen links open at once. Tabbed browsing allows me to keep track of them and not have them cluttering my screen, and I don't have to hunt for the window I need when referring to another article.

M.O.
http://www.madocowain.com
http://www.playmaille.com

[Janak Parekh]

That means that any virus, or malicious program of any sort that you inadvertently execute have access to *everything*. While *yes*, people can create a normal "user" account, and log in with that, they are then forced to "log out" in order to install software, etc.
For what it's worth, XP has made great strides in this problem. If you're a regular user and run a setup program, it'll ask you for an Administrator password to elevate privileges for installation purposes.

Still, it's too convenient to be an Administrator-user - I'm one right now, hopefully I know what I'm doing ;) OTOH, people running Linux boxes shudder at the thought of running anything special as "root", and just "su" whenever necessary.

--janak