Lazycoder

MSN magazine recommends Mozilla over IE

Are the Browser Wars Back? – How Mozilla’s Firefox trumps Internet Explorer. By Paul Boutin

Well there you go, the Microsoft bloggers have talked about how they run FireFox, CERT issued a warning about using IE, and now a Microsoft sponsored online magazine recommends Mozilla over IE. Microsoft has proclaimed that there won’t be any new releases of IE until Longhorn, which is at least 2 years out from being Beta and 6 years from release I bet. I predict that any updates they make to IE in Longhorn won’t matter because everyone will be running something else.

Lots of the MS pundits (e.g. bloggers) like to say, “Well what makes you think that Mozilla will be any more secure once all the script kiddies start to target it?”. Well for starters, the Gecko engine isn’t crammed in and integrated with every major subsystem in the freakin’ operating system. The second thing is that Mozilla doesn’t run ActiveX controls natively or allow scripting access to the operating system. So system level attacks, like the ones that install ActiveX spyware and viruses, won’t be able to gain a foothold. That being said privacy and identity issues will still be vulnerable. Password sniffing attacks, redirects, and attacks of that nature will still be around and a major concern. But I think the major risks to my system are mitigated by my running Mozilla FireFox.