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Calle Hedberg wrote: | Hi, | | Interesting discussion. I installed Firefox 2-3 days ago, and none of my | IE-based web apps work any more. Cannot log in, things hang, etc. | There is so much that can go wrong on Windows box, especially one that has been 'extended' by applications, that this is a really hard thing to ~ debug without extended experiments. I don't see this behavior on our Windows boxen, but then we probably don't run the same software as you, other then IE and Firefox. | | By the way: | One of my collegues - who also is Open Source oriented - this morning | warned me against using Firefox, alleging that "it is full of spyware". | He said he had installed it on a Linux box and intercepted "a lot of | suspicious traffic". | I have it on a linux box as well as a Windows box. It became my standard browser about a month ago. I am pretty sure there is no spyware included in it, you can look at the source if you want and build it yourself. On ~ Windows, I use spybots regularly and it has never complained about anthing attached to firefox, but routinely finds stuff attached to IE.
Both IE 6 with latest patches and Firefox have some pretty good features turned on by default to help defeat spy ware and mal ware. One thing to look for in both of them is that pop up's are blocked by default. Many sites rely on pop ups to work, for example to present a login form or a notification box. Both browsers allow you to create exception lists, which I have had to do for several of our commercial applications.
It's worth noting that most spy ware is inserted by visiting web sites using an unprotected browser or web enabled e-mail. I have personally seen windows computers, installed from scratch, and then two months later rendered completely useless by spy and ad ware just by having 1 adult and 2 kids browse the web for two months off of AOL!
~ I ran spybots on this particular computer and it found several hundred active bits of code! I needed to be extreme in running spybots, regediting things out and keeping the AV up2date, just to get the machine back to semi-normalcy. I still had to recommend that it be trashed and for them to start over again, being more careful this time to load defenses first.
| | Anybody else aware of such security problems with Firefox? | | I think the news sites such as slash-dot would be full of it by now. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.2.4 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Using GnuPG with Thunderbird - http://enigmail.mozdev.org
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