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Get Rid of Internet Explorer - Browse Happy!
Matt writes "BrowseHappy not only tells us why IE is unsafe, but also provides "switcher" stories of people that stopped using IE and switched to a safer browser. This campaign is not so much against IE, but for the use of safer and more user-friendly browsers."
remove the horrible color scheme
http://64.233.167.104/search?q=cache:eAw_5YZf-icJ: browsehappy.com/
Why is Internet Explorer unsafe?
See what people are saying about Internet Explorer, in the wake of its most recent security issues:
New York Times, In Search of a Browser That Banishes Clutter:
USA Today, Security risks swell for Microsofts Explorer:
The Inquirer, US Government warns against Internet Explorer:
Slate, Are the Browser Wars Back?:
The problem is that hackers continue to find and exploit security holes in Explorer
www.6502asm.com - Code 6502 assembly or.. DIE!!
I work for a decently sized bank data processing center. I know that our vendor we use for the core part of our applications and servers will only support Microsoft IE, mainly because they use a lot of .asp for their online compononents. A few banks have received word about the FCC declaring IE full of bugs, problems, and unsafe for most uses; these banks started asking about support for "other" browsers, and received word that there is no support planned anytime soon for any other browser other than IE.
YOU'RE WINNER !
Another lame blog
If you don't like it, drop the "it." infront of slashdot.org instead of complaining in public.
I knwo for a fact we put my stepmom on Firefox and all of a sudden she quit getting spyware.
I wish we had a study showing how many microsoft programmers use Firefox.
http://www.theregister.com/2004/08/20/sp2_scriptin g_vuln/
Then install Firefox and the extension "Open link in IE". If the link doesn't display right, use the quick link and open it in IE. Then close IE, and keep moving in firefox. It is a shame that MS is trying to break the HTML standard. I even wrote a script to email a pre-written comment to the webmaster of a page the renders wrong in firefox. This wouldn't be an issue if it weren't for lazy authors and shortcuts.
Pornzilla!
I write a lot of .asp, and I use both Mozilla and IE to check the code I write. Unless the person coding the ASP pages is an idiot, it doesn't make a diffrence, as everything is processed server side.
You run into problems because either a) the ASP coder uses vbscript for client side validation, and nothing but IE supports vbscript, or b) they don't bother to write cross-platform client side javascript code. I can't come down too hard when people don't do this, as the DOM differs from browser to browser.
The people responsable for this forking of the DOM need to be dragged nekkid across a cactus patch.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
My biggest reason for switching is that IE seldom will increase the text size when commanded to. Mozzila always will increase the text size of a web page. I can't read the fine print on a lot of web sites.
Many a long talk since then I have had with the man in the moon; he had my confidence on the voyage. Joshua Slocum
You clearly have never used another browser.
I was like you about a year ago, I never wanted to try another browser, Opera was just for yuppies as far as I was concerned, oooh tabbed browsing, I couldn't see the point. Mouse gestures... well I still don't see the point. I didn't realy mind ads because I used a massive host file to block adservers, but this was still limited. I was constantly getting popups and requests to install plugins I knew I didn't want, in short the web was turning into crap.
Then I decided to try out phoenix, why not, everyone else here was using it. So I downloaded it and I have never looked back. Seriously with an adblock extension and a clean looking theme it was leaps and bounds ahead of Internet Explorer right there. People just don't have an understanding of how convenient it is to google something, go down the first page middle clicking and then have all the pages of interest loaded by the time your done. Browsing slashdot is exactly the same, where before I was opening around 20 windows to view the stories I was interested in, I now just go down the front page, middle click all the stories and read mores... and by the time I'm done the first one is loaded.
But there is just so much more, NO popups, google search. I know you can get google bar but that is a third party addon and sometimes it just doesnt gel. And then there is the type and find function, if for example your looking at a large page of links you can just start to type the text of the link and firefox will find it. Go to suprnova.org and click in the movies frame and start to type the name of the movie you want.
I don't think less of those who haven't used anything else but IE, but seriously you need to try it, you just can't begin to fathom how much the internet doesn't suck without all the crap that targets IE until you stop using it and try something better.
The only woe I have with firefox is that a recient Windows XP update has screwed up launching webpages from the run dialogue, firefox still works but windows pops up with an error annoying but not that bad. I believe Windows XP would be infinitly better if I could actualy get rid of IE for good, but until such a time I'll just ignore it and hope it goes away.
Heh.. get yourself an account (if needed), login and switch to 'light' mode in your user preferences... you wont get bothered by colorschemes at all ;)
Have you ever tried holding ctrl then scrolling the mouse-wheel up or down? That's the quickest way I know to increase/decrease font size, and it works in IE and FF for me.
you can choose the max amount of ram for mozilla firefox to use with browser.cache.memory.capacity
just goto about:config
I'm not so sure about that... I've had many problems with Firefox. They block port 1080 for some obscure reason based on a really old trojan that has absolutely nothing to do with Firefox, yet to get around this block, you have to make an obscure config file edit. I had to use IE to access a friend's server. There is also the bug where if you used .8 and upgraded to .9, clicking the "Add engines..." for the search toolbar does nothing. I had to manually go to the http://mycroft.mozdev.org/download.html site. It's not that bad for people who know what they are doing, but, when that feature is lacking, users can go straight back to IE and download their favourite toolbar and use it's dictionary, search, or whatever. (IE Does block popups now, along with things like, onmouseover and and a few other scripts)
How do I run it without Internet Explorer?
_________ Help me get a PSP!
My banking works fine with firefox.
The thing that changed me over from IE was a nasty trojen virus. For months I had been recieving emails telling me to login to validate my bank account at the "official" bank website (Westpac). I don't have a bank account with them, so I dismissed it as spam. One day Norton picked up a virus on my computer, the Norton virus definition had only been added two days prior and my weekly scan picked up this virus. It was a key logger that logged key strokes (acct/pwd) when the title of IE had a certain message in the title bar. It emailed these account/pw details off to somewhere where someone would be waiting...
I'm not real sure how I got the trojen, I'm usually very careful, but if I had been recieving these spam messages for months before Norton was on the case, then I guess the trojen had been in the wild for months as well... I'm just lucky my bank details haven't been compromised so far... passwords are all changed...
Does it go on forever?
That is very interesting. To test your story, I created a new user account, 'Bogus' as only a member of the users group on my xpsp2 machine.
Using IE, I then went to yahoo.com and tried to install their toolbar. It told me that there was an error during installation and to click here to try again (clicking again didn't work).
I tried to install Google's toolbar; after a couple of warning dialogs (do you trust this file? it could be dangerous) it told me "You do not have sufficent access permissions to install the Google Toolbar onto this computer. Please log out, and log back in as an administrator. You can then install the toolbar."
Then I tried to install the gator wallet spyware thingy; it said "Setup cannot write to the registry. In order to install and run on Windows 2000 or XP, you must be a Standard User or an Administrator." Wrong. A standard user won't cut it.
So then I went to www.weatherbug.com. IE blocked a popup and a cookie (with an information screen telling me about what happened the first time). I then tried to install the program: it asked me my zipcode and then crashed while copying files telling me that it couldn't create some file in the \program files directory.
Maybe things have been beefed up since 2000? I created a similar account on a 2000sp3 computer. From IE, I tried to install the Yahoo and Google toolbars, Gator and Weatherbug. They all failed, giving me the same errors as XP did. The only thing different was that a popup from weatherbug.com got thru this time.
Do you have any other spyware/crapware/global programs for me to try?
Perhaps you misconfigured the accounts somehow or installed the junk yourself?
Don't get me wrong; I personally use Mozilla for the tabs and increased resilance.
IE may have its holes but the local security on NT doesn't. IE is just another user mode program; no hole in IE can cause the privledge escilation you describe.
If you are going to bash Windows, at least be fair.
Admins can deploy ZAP packages which can include settings, etc. You create them with a tool in the deployment utilities, as a component of RIS.
The ZAP packages may be published as GPOs the same way MSI's may, although I don't think they have the ability to be managed *after* the initial installation.
It's been a little while since I've done this so my knowledge is a bit rusty.
- ABM AMRO
- AIG
- American Express
- CapitolOne
- Charles Schwaab
- First Savings Bank of NJ
- GMAC
- PennStar
- Wachovia
- Wayne Bank
There's probably several more that I can't immediately remember. Perhaps it would be more accurate if you listed the banks that gave you trouble.--- A man with a briefcase can steal more money, than any man with a gun. [Don Henley]
Internet Explorer runs entirely in user mode, in the security context of the current user. The only way to get more privledges from there is to exploit a local vulnerability in the kernel or some privledged service. Any user mode program can make use of a local vuln; IE and ActiveX are not special. Many operating systems have had local vulns; Linux patched one involving mremap() not too long ago. The local vuln in the article you linked to has been fixed since NT4sp4; it isn't going to work on 2k or XP. Besides, all the problems listed either exist on UNIXes too or have been fixed for 5+ years.
Not ASP, but if you use ASP.NET you might have problems.
If you rely on the HTML emitted by many built-in controls (and of course, many do, because that is a large part of the attraction to the tools), then you will often have that problem. It is not a fundamental problem with ASP.NET -- the default configuration of some tools often sniff for IE or Netscape, and do not know what to do with Mozilla/Firefox/Opera.
Other times, the controls will rely on document.all for not just DHTML, but form postbacks. document.all was IE 4/5's DOM, and it was rejected by the W3C, so Mozilla and the others do not support them. (Firefox might be adding this support, I am not sure.)
At any rate, there is nothing fundamentally wrong with ASP.NET that would prevent ASP.NET generated pages from working flawlessly in any browser -- like the original poster said, it all ends up as HTML. Unfortunately, the tools tend to generate that HTML along the above lines, which work best (tm) under IE and Netscape.
A developer with a good eye will be able to develop for any browser, but, sadly, too many people rely too heavily upon the tools to do the job. It is often not even a developer skillset issue -- when a certain tool lets you hit 96% of the market in 5 days, versus hitting 100% in 9 days, many businesses will tell their developers to take the 5 days. While that is the case, and while those tools default towards non-standard HTML, the problem will persist.
Gentlemen, start your tinfoil hats...
You can still get that independence!
Use Firefox to build and align your bookmarks in the way you desire, and then export it to an HTML file.
Then, set the homepage of ALL of your browsers to that file!
Problem solved.
SCREW THE ADS! http://adblock.mozdev.org/ Proud user of teh Fox of Fire - Registered Linux User #289618