Safe Browser???

Only reason why I went to Firefox is as non-tech savy person it seems to work better then IE 7 and it became too problematic and difficult to use.
Only time I use it now is when I have too.
I hadn't really thought about safety I assume any legit one would be safe or people would be complaining and stop using it once their bank information got in the wrong hands,etc.
There is very few things I use my browser for other then searching for design ideas, basic banking, educational and personal searches.
Yet recently saw this pop up from Firefox and it made me wonder about how safety it was...
I did a search about "No Script" and the first one that look like it was made by the person who created it confused me.
I couldn't determine if it had download link or was telling me how unsafe it was, etc.

Yes they do pick and choose. The ACID test is just another 'non-official' thing. I imagine it tests for compliance with a subset of W3C's recommendations. If that's so, then even that is not fully W3C compliant; i.e. lots of the recommendations are left out, some of which will be included in one browser but not in another - picking and choosing.

Also W3C don't, and never did, create "standards". Go to the site and read it for yourself. They create recommendations - that's all. It is not an 'official' body. It's just a group of volunteers. If you really want standards, there is only one place to find them - IE. Why? Because, as the most widely used browser by a hell of a long way, the users have made it the standard.

And no doubt across multpile versions of any browser. Unfortunately, backward compatibility problems have always been the case, especially when IE and NS were bringing out a new version every year. When NS packed up, the release of new IE versions ground almost to a halt which made things better for a while - only 2 browsers to deal with - the current IE and the previous IE.

aha! Therein lies the problem! I have no default browser lol, I don't allow anything to open unless I physically open it.

/me runs off to set Firefox to default

Edit: wait, Firefox is set to default

Thank you!!!!

From what I have heard and from reading between the lines, this emergencey patch disables the XML parsing of IE7 until a full fix can be put out. If you go back into setting and turn it back on you have just re-enabled the vulnerability.

The easy solution: don't use IE7. Don't use Safari either, not because it leaves you vulnerable to other people but that it leaves you vulnerable to Apple and associates. IE6 with service pack 2 (6.0.2900) works fine and is not open to these latest attacks. Same with FireFox3 (3.0.5 is current I think) and either one will perform about equal.

I *think* there is also an option in SL to use the default web browser.

I would highly recommend Firfox over IE, for a start it more secure and conforms to web standards and you can install addons.

If your into social networking you could take a look at Flock (www.flock.com), its based on Firefox but has a lot of social network features built it. It runs a little slower and uses a little more memory, but its very cool to stay social.

It doesn't matter, the point is that it defines a fixed and common subset that all the major browsers but IE are coding to comply with. De-facto or de-jure, it IS a stake in the ground.
Go to the IETF and look at the standards that define the entire Internet. They are not called "standards", they're called "requests for comments". They are all created by volunteers.
Which one?
Not in many years, not since Netscape dumped the old Mozilla source tree and started over with a new core (gecko). Unless you're trying to be compatible to Netscape 4, getting a page that renders correctly in IE5.5, IE6, and IE7 (all in current use) is the hardest part of putting together a portable web page. Luckily there are a lot of sites that document these hacks now, but 'twas not always so and each new version of IE sets things back to the start.

Today, writing a portable web page to the W3C standards (and they are standards, better ones than some that have been blessed by the ISO and ANSI) and putting in hacks for IE5/6/7 is the only practical way to go.

Sure it's a stake in the ground but, as I said, each browser picks and chooses what to implement from the W3C recommendations. From what you say, most choose to implement all of the stake in the ground parts, but then they pick and choose other parts to implement, making the browers incompatible to some extent.

Currently, IE7. When I was making websites, I abandoned previous versions after a year or so. If a small percentage of people wanted to continue with old browsers, I didn't cater for them.

I haven't created websites/pages for quite a long time now, so it's not really of any interest to me any more. If I do make any more, I'll do what I used to - create them for the people's standard browser (IE) and ignore any others.

In practice, there are fewer compatibility problems between all recent (since Netscape 4) versions of all other browsers than between IE6 and IE7. And IE8 is coming along.

A standard that only has one implementation and that changes incompatibly from version to version is not a standard at all.
So, basically, you're not actually familiar with the current state of the art, and you never had any interest in creating standards-compliant websites, but you still want to argue that IE is a de-facto standard... even though it's not even compatible with itself.

Not for a number of years.

There are no 'standards' as such. We've been through that already. There are only recommendations. In my early years, I did cater for NS and IE, and for multiple versions of each, but after NS was scrapped, I had no interest in using workarounds to suit small minority browsers. I think that's the same for everyone, isn't it? Does anyone cater for everything out there?

IE is the people's standard. It has about 80% of the usership, so I understand. The browser with such a huge lead in usership is the standard browser. If another browser took such a lead, then it would become the 'standard' browser. I'm not an IE supporter as such. I'm a supporter of compatibility, and the only thing out there, that makes sense to be compatible with, is IE.

To my way of thinking, when a browser has 80% of the usership, it is the 'standard' browser, and small browsers, such as Firefox, Opera, etc., would do well to be compatible with it.

Yes, and you're still mistaking "this document says it's a standard" for "this document is an effective standard". I'm talking about the latter, because I have to work in the real world.

IE is not an effective standard, because to create a website for IE you have to continually update it and update your workarounds for new versions of IE. When you target standards you can depend on them NOT changing the interfaces you're depending on, unless the standard changes them, and you can still make it work on IE. So you only need to update it when you actually have a reason to.

In addition, every new version of IE is changing to be MORE in compliance wit the standards. So if you write your website to be standards-compliant, you will get a website that is more likely to work with newer versions of IE.

New versions of IE have been pretty rare since the demise of NS but, even so, both the previous and new versions do need need to be catered for.

There is no ideal, otherwise new developments wouldn't happen, so multi-browser support will be needed from to time (for a while after a new version comes out). The best that can be done is to use something like W3C and treat their recommendations as actual standards - and implement them all - not just some as happens now. Maybe not W3C though, because they are painfully slow, if my memory is correct, and inovative ideas would either be stiffled or delayed for far too long.

For me, the ideal would be for browser makers to have regular meetings and decide the display standards that will be implemented by them all. After that, each maker could add what trimmings they like and compete in that way - just like they do now. It's the display inconsistences that's the problem, and it's silly, because there's no good reason for there not to be cooperation between them.

Um, that IS the kind of thing that goes on at meetings of the committees that write the standards that I'm talking about.

As I said, I'm out of date. Are they meetings of the browser makers or of a different body? It makes a big difference. Bodies like W3C can make all the recommendations they like, and good ones they are too, but unless browser makers have a commitment to implementing them, it's just a step in the right direction and no more. If the browser makers had those meeting, then they could standardise the display and make the creation of websites much better.

All the major browser developers (including Microsoft) have had representatives on the IETF and the W3C for at least a decade. They're "volunteers", yes, but the standards are not written by any random Joe Blow with a membership fee:


Sure, there are some small companies in there as well, but when Microsoft (or Google) or Apple (or HP) say "we think it should look like X" they're going to get more attention than when the Center for Democracy and Technology or even Cisco says it.

hmm... If it's *just* browser makers, it should standardise the display, assuming they are all there for that purpose. Why doesn't it?

Cisco doesn't make a browser do they? And I've never heard of the Center for Democracy and Technology. Such standard-makers should be only those who have the ability to implement the decisions.

It's not just anything, it's all the stakeholders, but the people writing the software are the big dogs.
It pretty much does. Apart from IE, which has been late coming to the party, the behavior of graphic elements is pretty standard across browsers.
No, so they are more likely to have representives on committees working on HTTP and other parts of the WWW that impact them.
They're mostly there, I suspect, as observers.

Together with you saying the MS thinks it's a good idea, it actually sounds very promising. How long has it been going?

I said earlier that I'm not in favour of any particular browser. I'm only in favour of cross-browser compatibility - at least for the main ones - and I don't care who writes the standards, although I believe that W3C does tend to drag its feet too much.

Bit by bit, since 1989, but it wasn't until Netscape/Mozilla decided to actually pay attention to the standards process because Microsoft was kicking their butts at being incompatible that it really got under way. Microsoft started paying attention, oh, around the time Firefox started getting traction.

Funny thing that.

Internet Explorer is so insecure, an attacker could pee at their monitor and have it land on an IE user's desk. Also, if you're having problems with Hotmail in Mozilla, odds are Microsoft's deliberately coding only for IE: Drop hotmail.

Once again proving that with software, it's not "you get what you pay for" but rather "you can do worse, but it costs more."

Fun thing about IE is that in all Windows versions 98 and later, there's no way to actually stop using IE at some level.

Who gives their kids Administrator privileges on their computer? Talk about shooting yourself in the foot!

This is so rare these days that it's usually not worth starting IE for when you can just boycott the moron.

Someone who needs plausible deniability to cover for their porn addiction.