Slashdot Mirror
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."
http://64.233.167.104/search?q=cache:eAw_5YZf-icJ: browsehappy.com/
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
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!
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.
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!
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.