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Dump it!

It's official: The U.S. government's Computer Emergency Readiness Team (US-CERT) is warning Web surfers to stop using Microsoft's Internet Explorer (IE) browser.

"US-CERT is a non-profit partnership between the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the public and private sectors. It was established in September 2003 to improve computer security preparedness and response to cyber attacks in the United States."

...

"US-CERT researchers say the IE browser does not adequately validate the security context of a frame that has been redirected by a Web server. It opens the door for an attacker to exploit the flaw by executing script in different security domains."

So what are you waiting for? Get a real browser, like Mozilla, Firefox, or Opera...

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Comments (7)

And I would highly suggest Firefox. Especially the latest version (0.9) is absolutely incredible. I downloaded the free version of Opera and it was downright unusable. Not just because the ads (the free version makes you stare at ads while you surf) made it disorienting, but because the interface itself was positively daunting to look at.

If you're switching from IE, go Firefox, all the way. It is the easiest on the eyes and it's much faster than Mozilla 1.x.

Eh, Firefox is a fine browser. But I've been a registered user of Opera now for over three years (registration => no ad banner), and I wouldn't be without it.

Opera has more features than you can shake a stick at. I love being able to render unreadable sites readable instantly, by substituting my own custom style sheet— simple as pressing Ctrl-G, or pressing a button on the address bar. I love having 18 different searches (Google, AllTheWeb, Amazon, Ebay, Usenet, etc.) available from a single search box— some of the searches, again, my own custom creation. And if you don't like the default user interface, adding, deleting, or rearranging buttons and whatnot is as simple as drag-and-drop.

I've got Opera looking like this. Works like a charm.

Paul Burgess
Opera/7.51 (X11; Linux i686; U) [en]

Casey Tompkins:

And to complete the trinity I prefer Mozilla! :)

Chris, I've tried all of them (as well as Konquerer under Linux) and I don't see how Firefox is faster. But then again I have a very fast (7200rpm w/8megs cache) hard drive and very fast (400mz DDR) memory, so maybe if I had slower hardware I could see a difference.

Opera has often been touted as much faster than IE as well. I suspect that the differences are more apparent using a dial-up connection, and/or older hardware..

Me, I find the Firefox interface "cartoony," and lacking in many of the customization features found in Mozilla, although some of them may have been folded back into more recent versions of 'fox. Even if you skin it, to me it's still a skinned cartoony look. :) I have similar objections to Firebird vs. Mozilla email.

We obviously all have different priorities, so which one's "best?" As the old computer saying goes "well, that depends..." Heh.

The last version of Mozilla I ever used was 1.3, so it was probably alot slower than the latest version. I also have Firefox modified to be even faster than it is out of the "box".

My experience has been that, on newer hardware, all the browsers are reasonably fast— some perhaps marginally faster than others, but scarcely enough to notice.

Of course there are yet other choices in alternative browsers. KMeleon is a very fast, lightweight browser for Windows— like Mozilla and Firefox, KM is Gecko-based, though its interface is specifically written for Windows rather than using XUL. KM is perhaps the most customizable browser there is, infinitely extensible thanks to a built-in macro language, but customizing KM is a rather technical task, and often somewhere between poorly documented and outright undocumented. I pulled KM into very nice shape on my old computer, but to do so, I had to go in and hack the main executable file with a hex editor, etc. Par for the course with KMeleon.

I also see that, after a hiatus of two years, development has resumed on the SkipStone browser, another Gecko-based browser for Linux. Have downloaded the tarball, will have to experiment with it some time.

Casey Tompkins:

Hmmm. Have you heard anything about Galleon lately, Paul?

Yeah, Galeon keeps coming out with new versions. They came out with 1.3.15 at the end of May, and (from their older, "stable" branch) 1.2.14 a few weeks ago.

When I first switched over to Linux, I experimented with Galeon some, and more or less liked it. Light and minimalistic, like KMeleon, though not especially fast. Also Galeon, unlike KM, needs Mozilla installed in order to run. But I find I haven't used Galeon lately. I've got some ancient version, 1.3.3 or something like that, on my system.

I dunno, some of these lesser-known browsers, like KMeleon, have a community of avid supporters. But I'm not sure what Galeon's fortunes are, since it was dumped as the default browser for GNOME.

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