Stephen A. Lawrence wrote on 7-9-09: What's Chrome got? Lovely UI.
What's it missing? Cookie control!! You get better tracking cookie control with IE than you do with Chrome! Unless Google has changed this, the concept of arbitrarily limiting cookie lifetimes to the life of the session (with a list of exceptions) is completely missing from Chrome. I believe there were some other cookie control issues as well, but that was the big one, which really stood out for me: Use Chrome, be tracked, it's as simple as that -- and the old argument that they can't match up the cookies with *you* is either already false or certainly likely to be false in the future. If Google can push something on consumers which "frees" them from Microsoft while simultaneously "freeing" the vendors from the nasty cookie controls of Firefox they'll view it as a home run, I'm sure. Stephen A. Lawrence wrote on 7-9-09: ... Microsoft, too --- consider particularly the "mouse mess" at Microsoft a while back: http://www.grc.com/wmf/wmf.htm Finally, open source OS code is likely to be *better* *vetted* than closed source code. It's not clear the "mouse mess" could have remained hidden in Linux for nearly so long as it was in Microsoft's OS -- it lurked in there for years before someone noticed it, and Microsoft was slow to admit there was a problem or do anything about it after someone found out, which resulted in a huge number of instances of exploits. Part of the reason it can be so hard to do anything about problems like this in a closed source system, of course, is that almost nobody gets to look at the code, so the pool of potential whistle blowers is very restricted. For a second example, google "rootkit" and "sony" to find out just how badly you can get nailed when you're dealing with closed source. Once again, the ones who were playing fast and loose with the internals were not hackers (they can't, they're not in a position to do that). They were the inhouse programmers at Sony, working with full access to the (secret) source. And the ones who got nailed were the general public, duffer and expert alike, who are not allowed to see the secret sources, and so can't know what's actually running on their systems... Stephen A. Lawrence wrote on 7-9-09: ... in defense of Windows, keep in mind that the single biggest reason it gets attacked 50 times more frequently than Linux is that it's about 50 times more popular. If your goal is to take over a few hundred systems, and you figure your trojan/retrovirus/whatever is only going to successfully infect one system in 10,000 which it contacts, you'd better pick a popular target. And the professional hackers, the ones who create zombie armies for DOS attacks and who-knows-what other nefarious schemes, are shooting for thousands or tens of thousands of 'slave' systems, so they need a really big pool of targets to go after. Hi All, After having tried most of them, I think Netscape 3 for Linux is the best browser. It allows me to direct cookies to /dev/null, that big bit bucket in the sky, without upsetting the purveyors that are so insistent that their cookies be accepted. And, with Java, Java Script, and images turned off, it goes like greased lightning. In judging Windows popularity, worldwide usage should be considered, especially in India. I have the feeling that all Windows systems, except maybe 3.1, are compromised by "Promise" software. Other countries may be reluctant to let that demon in, and may insist on inspectable software like Linux. Jack Smith
