Slashdot Mirror
How Can I Trust Firefox?
TheRealSlimShady writes "Peter Torr (who?) from Microsoft invites a certain flamewar with his essay 'How can I trust Firefox?' He raises some interesting security related points about the download and installation of Firefox, some of which should probably be addressed. The focus is on code signing, which Microsoft is hot on. Of course, the obvious question is 'Do I trust Firefox less than IE?'"
I don't get your point. Once native code runs on your machine it can do just about anything. For example, it could change one the extensions you already have installed to do its nasty work.. or Mozilla itself. People can do the same with IE (and do) but that's not the point here. Five times over the last two days I've heard people shouting from the rooftops that everyone should use FireFox cause you don't get spyware. This is so stupid. The reason you don't get spyware is because it's a waste of freakin' time for the spyware makers to target 5% of users instead of 95% of users. If 95% of people were using FireFox there would be just as much spyware for FireFox as there is for IE. So shut the hell up about spyware already.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Indeed, and imagine the furore if Microsoft did the same thing and disallowed installation of any "extensions" for IE that weren't "Microsoft approved".
Hello, welcome to the 21st Century. Would just like to correct you - there is such a thing as MULTIPLE users in Windows - NT, 2000, 2003, XP (Home & Professional) all have this facility. There's no shortage of security holes, no argument. Fact is, you can set user access in Windows too. Now just because peopledecide not to, that's not a windows bug. Like you said if you run things as root in Linux...
My Favourite Meme
You've never seen a Gentoo compile-fest have you?
Is that like when Furries have sex?
Freedom: "I won't!"
I have had an IE isntall eat NT4.. so *shrug*
I still don't see whats wrong with I.E. I don't have any spyware, I don't get any popups, I don't get viruses. I use Internet Explorer or exploiter or exposer or whatever monicker has been created for it now with no problems after installing the Google Toolbar a year ago. Perhaps the question isn't when will the internet explorer users wakeup to security, but when will open source nerds wakeup that sometimes good enough, is good enough, and the ability to in real time debug javascript in a web browser just isn't important to more than a handful of web developers.